Page rank or "PR" is a value given to webpages by Google, which is calculated by

1. Counting how many other pages link to that page.
2. Giving a weighting to each one of these links for quality, readability and credibility.

Webpages are then given are score of between 1 and 10, which is an exponential weighting like the richter scale, thus a page rank(pr) of 5, is ten times higher than a page rank(pr) of 4.

Older sites, tend to have higher page rank, as website gather more links over time. You can use the Google toolbar to see a given web pages page rank.

Usually the home page of a website has higher page rank than the other pages of a site. There are exceptions to this rule, sometime a page other than the home page on a site, might have a link to it from a very important, credible site. This may result in the target page having a higher page rank than the home page.

Why worry about Page Rank?

The reality is, you don't need to. Page rank, is only one factor in determining how high a website of web page will rank. Additionally, using the Google toolbar can be a bit deceiving as it does not update daily, it only updates every 8 weeks or so. Page rank however, updates daily so a webpage may have a higher or lower page rank than is showing.

Sometimes Google will reduce your page rank, if it believes your site is possibly doing something it shouldn't be with regarding to search engine rankings. This is something we check when we are analysing your site. If your site appears to have a lower page rank than it should… and we can find logical explanation, then we look for things that may have caused Google to drop your site's page rank.If/when we find them? We fix them, tell Google, and they will usually restore your page rank to its correct level within 8 weeks.