Today SEOs make a point of saying that PageRank (PR) is irrelevant, but that’s a limited worldview and the reality is that not only a lot of link buying and selling is based on PR and ignores the fact that Google still uses PR in its crawling, indexing and ranking processes.
How does PR help you?
* A web page needs a certain threshold of PR before it can be crawled – so for your website to be deepcrawled (with Google hitting all your site pages), you need to get some high PR links to your site. Keep in mind that the Page Rank we see in the toolbar is an outdated Page Rank, but it’s the best indication we have.
* Although not always true, PR is usually associated with authority websites. High PR links (relevant and in-context, of course) are a good way to build authority links.
* With all other factors being the same, a high PR link is more valuable than a low PR link.
* PR is a measure of link popularity as well, and considering how Yahoo and MSN give more weight to sheer link popularity, it is a good indicator of how your website can perform in other search engines.
PageRank by itself does not automatically convey high search engine rankings. PR proper keyword usage does not help either (as it used to once). But PageRank is still an important metric in calculating value of links and plays a (limited) role in ranking search engine results.
For example: to see your website’s Page Rank, you need to download and install Google’s free Page Rank toolbar. For firefox user you can try search status addon to check google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking or try using SeoQuake firefox addon which allows user to view a large number of Search Engine parameter.