Explained Google Page Rank

Many newcomers to SEO mistake Google's PR with Google rankings. This article explains the true meaning of Google PageRank and how it can be used in Search Engine Optimization.

PR is a measure of how ‘important’ a page is (according to Google). For the purpose of this article, I will only discuss PR in the SEO context – what it means and how to use it.
First things first: PR is not the cause or the result of high rankings.
PR depends mainly on 2 things:
Incoming links and traffic.
Some SEOs make the mistake of assuming high rankings come as a result of high PR, when in fact high PR is one natural outcome of high rankings.

Better SEO = higher rankings = more traffic = Higher PR 

However, the concept behind Google’s PR is crucial when working with External Links (i.e.: incoming) and Internal Links (i.e.: the website’s structure). Every link from A to B is considered as a ‘vote of confidence/credibility’ from A to B. We can use PR as a physical measurement of how this credibility travels from one URL to the next.
The role of SEO in this case is…

1. Off-site: to maximise incoming PR by increasing the number of incoming links and the quality of incoming links.
2. On-site: to harness incoming PR so that none of it is wasted (on broken links) and that most of it is channelled to the most important pages of the website (i.e.: the homepage, main category pages)

To sum up, PR isn’t a factor in SEO, neither is it a direct result of SEO. But the makings of a high-PR website are very similar to those of a high-ranking website. And because of that, the concept of PR can be used to...

• properly apply linking techniques
• measure the effectiveness of these techniques