Google page rank is an important factor to most webmasters, even though a lot of them don't seem to really understand. Webmasters are constantly worrying about their page rank, often for the wrong reason. Page rank is important but not for the reason that many people seem to think that it is, page rank as no bearing on search engine results, at least as far as your own page is concerned. Page rank is about assessing your sites authority and that is used to determine the amount of link juice your site has. The page rank of the sites linking to your site is more important than the page rank of your own site.
The most important thing to keep in mind about Google page rank and the thing that is most misunderstood about it is that it has absolutely no relevance on where your website ranks. Page rank is used by Google to determine how much authority your site has, but authority isn't used in actually ranking websites. Where authority comes into play is in how much value a link from your site provides to the site being linked to. Google's algorithm uses authority in order to determine the value of a link coming to a site in order to rank the site receiving the link, in order to do this they need a way to determine authority, the way they do this is with page rank Page rank is a number between zero and ten that Google uses to determine the authority of your site. There are very few PR 10 sites, the US government site is probably the only one, even Google is only a 9. The vast majority of sites are a 3 or lower.
A lot of webmasters obsess about their page rank because they don't really understand it's purpose. It can not be stressed enough that page rank has no relevance to how that site gets ranked in the search results. That being said there is value to having a high page rank site, the primary one being that it makes your links more valuable. Most webmasters have more than one site, so having a high page rank site makes it easy for them to send a high authority link to their other sites. There is also value when it comes to trading links, it is much easier to get a high authority site to link to you if you have a high authority site to link back with.
Since there is value to having a high page rank it is useful to know how it is determined, but it's mostly SEO Beginners who overvalue it. Not surprisingly Google keeps this a secret since they don't want people gaming the system but it is pretty clear that it is based on links and content. A site with a lot of incoming links will have a higher page rank, especially if they come from an authority site. It is also possible to increase your page rank by adding content, generally the more content your site has the higher the page rank The way to increase your page rank is to do the same things that you would do for search engine optimization, this is why a lot of webmasters are confused about the purpose of page rank