Learn/What-PageRank-Means-for-Your-Website

We have this old definition page: PageRank

Ed from Facebook suggested "How to get a better Page Rank"

PageRank is all about the reputation of links to a site. The idea of how likely a random web surfer would be to click a link to your website. Those odds are better if lots of websites link to you and/or if popular websites link to you.

Google's internal PageRank is a part of the original algorithm and it's still important. It's being updated all the time and it's hidden in the black box that is Google. Public 'toolbar PageRank' numbers that we can see are updated about four times per year and they may or may not be directionally accurate.

Toolbar PageRank is displayed as a 0 through 10 number, or unranked. PageRank is not a linear scale: The majority of websites have a public PageRank of 0, while fewer have PR 1, and even fewer have PR 2 and so on... up until just a handful of websites that have a PageRank of 8, 9 or 10. (Google, Facebook, etc.) For more on the math of the PageRank link analysis algorithm, see the Wikipedia article about PageRank.

For the average website, a toolbar PageRank of 3, 4 or 5 is quite good.

Until October 2009, toolbar PageRank was a component of Google Webmaster Tools for a website. A Google employee said of its removal that the PageRank metric really isn't important and that Google has been trying to get people to focus on it less. [1] [2]

Ted Ulle (Tedster) from WebmasterWorld said in an interview, "What PageRank is measuring (or attempting to measure) is still very critical — both the quality and number of other web pages that link to the given page. We don't need to worship those public PR numbers, but we definitely do need quality back-links (and quality internal linking) to rank well on competitive queries."

Matt Cutts and others tried to get PageRank removed from Google Toolbar way back in 2007.

A 2007 post from SEOBook.com suggests that a website's last cache date (when Google last crawled the page) is a better indicator of Google's algorithmic opinion of that website. To find out when a website's homepage was last cached by Google, search for the website (like example.com) in Google and click on the "cached" link below its result. If it was cached in the last couple of days -- or better yet, today -- it's probably doing well. If it was more than a week ago, Google may think that it's content is stale or less valuable.

Questions About PageRank

If my website's PageRank decreases, does that mean it has been penalized? No.

http://searchengineland.com/what-is-a-link-worth-part-1-valuing-pagerank-34526

36 SEO Myths: Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings.

Matt Cutts talks about PageRank in October 5 2010 video: