0 What PageRank Means for Your Website

What is PageRank?

PageRank is all about reputation and the value of links. It's a measurement of how important any web page is, based on the number of links to that page and the importance of the sites providing those links.
PageRank is at the heart of Google's ranking algorithm, which guides the company's attempt to return the most relevant results for any search query. Google uses at least 200 ranking factors, which is good to keep in mind whenever anyone starts talking about PageRank.
Interesting factoid: While PageRank is a measure applied to web pages, it's actually named after Larry Page, one of Google's two co-founders.

What do PageRank numbers mean?

Google's internal PageRank calculations are continually updated, but the public PageRank numbers we see on toolbars like the one I have on Firefox are updated only a few times per year. The number you see on a toolbar may not be an accurate reflection of Google's current internal PageRank rating for that page. Matt Cutts of Google explains this in the video to the right.
Public PageRank is displayed in toolbars as a number ranging from zero to 10 (or unranked). Each page within a website will have its own PageRank value. The vast majority of web pages have a public PageRank of zero. As the PageRank number goes up, the number of web pages with that number gets smaller. Just a handful of very popular web pages have a PageRank of 8, 9 or 10.
For most websites, the home page will have the highest public PageRank. Other prominent pages on the site will have higher PageRank than less-linked, less-visited pages. A typical website whose home page has a public PageRank of 3, 4 or 5 is doing quite well.