One cold rainy day many years ago Google created a measuring device called PageRank. With innocent intentions it was supposed to be used to measure the 'popularity' of your site and pages. Just like with any feature released it didn't take long for webmasters to figure out how to abuse the system.

Since that time many people have been tricked into thinking that PageRank is the magical number that will make you rich. As I mentioned in a previous post PageRank is only one of hundreds of factors the search engines look at related to your ranking position. There has been such misinformation on the Internet by SEO cowboys trying to get your money to increase your PageRank that even Google has started backing away on the importance of that figure.

Recently I was reading a post about why PageRank ...

 Q: My site's PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. If you're looking for metrics, we'd encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.

In my site's first 2-3 years of operation I had a PR of zero but I still showed on the first page for my intended search results even above a PR 5 site. The proof is in the pudding. My site now has a PR of 2 but just as they say at Google "don't bother thinking about it."

Hope you find this information helpful!