Importance of Google PageRank
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs
Google PageRank measures page importance relative to other pages included in the search engine’s index. It assigns a numeric weight from zero to ten for each web page based on incoming links. Google considers a link to a page as a vote, indicating importance. Most important websites have a PageRank of 10. Users also usually perceive sites with higher PageRank to be more trustworthy. To see it go to the Google toolbar and enable the pagerank feature.
When websites with high PageRank link to your pages, your PageRank increases. Building relevant links naturally adds to a higher PageRank but irrelevant links can hurt the rankings because Google attempts to devalue irrelevant links. But remember that PageRank is a measure for a page and not the entire website. So, while your website homepage might carry a PageRank of 8 it does not mean that other pages have the same rank.
PageRank indicated by google is a cached value and thus, it is usually out of date and not a very accurate metric. Also, Google’s PageRank is not the only link-related ranking algorithm, but it’s the most popular one today; others include Hilltop algorithm, ExpertRank of Ask.com, HITS, and TrustRank. Recently, there have been many arguments against PageRank and some even claim that PageRank wrecked the web.