How Important is page rank?

Google issues every site that it considers to be worthy with a Page Rank (PR) score from 0 - 10

PR can be checked here: http://www.commercetuned.co.uk/pr-checker/

There are zero's and zero's however, as a site may be new and so not have a ranking yet in which event it will have an empty white PR display. Alternatively if the white display bar is grey it may well mean that the site has been "sandboxed" or banned from Google completely.

Beyond that there is a sliding scale from 1 to 10, there are approxiamately 30 PR10 sites worldwide, and even Google.co.uk is only a PR9 !! The size and scale of PR 8, 9 and 10 sites prohibits membership for all but the most dedicated of us. But all is not lost, Google rewards success and the more it rewards you the more successfull you will become. Once you have added enough high quality content, and seen to it that you have thousands of high quality backlinks to your site, your PR will increase.

On occasion Google has a rerank, this has historically happened in spring and autumn. On occasion they have downgraded many sites, but this is to be expected as otherwise they would end up with millions of PR10 sites and that would serve no purpose.

The whole point of a PR score is to give your site a value of worth, this in effect means that if you link to site x and you are a PR4 site then it will be more benefit to him than if your site was a PR2 site. It allows Google to give links from your site a score so that they can be of benefit to whom you link to. The same thing works in reverse so that you benefit from the PR of the site that links to you.

The benefit of getting a link from a PR7 or PR8 page can't be stressed enough. If you can get a link from a PR7 homepage then your site will be spidered by Google every few days and will be considered more valuable.