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Developed by the big G, Page Rank is a grading system, which is based on the real-world Reputation Mechanism. Although Google coined the term Page Rank, other major search engines also apply similar system to judge the precedence of pages while listing results. In short, Page Rank, abbreviated as PR, strives to reflect the reputation of a page in the cyber world.

People earn reputation when they do something novel and are appreciated by many other people, especially by prominent people. Similarly, in Search Engine arena, when a page contains something important, many other pages provide links to that page, especially pages, which have high PR and finally the new page earns its own PR. But it�s not just about back links. The actual mysterious algorithm is believed to analyze more than 20 factors to produce a Page Rank for a page. Some of them can be:

1. Number of Incoming Links
2. PR of pages providing back links
3. Number of links on the pages giving back link
4. Outgoing Links
5. Domain extension
6. Lifetime of a domain
7. Country
8. Presence of DTD statement
9. Presence of Errors on page
10. Correct syntax of robots.txt, if present.
11. Traffic/Visitors
12. Links from Human Edited Directories like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory

Is PR really important?

Many argue that Page Rank has no relation whatsoever with the ranking in SERPs. And in most cases it appears to be true when we see pages with lower PR above those with higher PR. But the explanation is simple. Page Ranks are keyword independent. Let�s put it this way. Condolezza Rice currently may be the most reputed woman but when we talk about pretty women, thousands of other women surpass her. That�s exactly how the results are ranked in SE result pages. But when two pages are equally optimized for a keyword, PR gets to be the deciding z-factor.

Thousands of words or phrases, for which no page is optimized, are searched each day. In such case, whose page gets better ranking? Obviously, the ones with good PR.