My first noob question. PR?
 

I was just over at Linkspun and signed up. I see every site has a "PR", PR0, PR2, etc., and lot of talk in the forums about PR but no real explination. What is PR and how is it important?

PR = Page Rank (for Google)

Google asigns a page rank to websites. If you get links back from sites with high page ranks your page rank will probably go up.

What's it good for? Not that much anymore, but who can really tell. I guess it's a good indicator to see if a site is "important" according to google's weird algorythms.

Some of my sites with PR0 get way more google traffic than some of my sites with PR3.

Don't worry about Page Rank,, Even Google have stopped doing anything major with.

It's been 7 months or more since we saw any real big updates, There been a very few small tweeks done by Google, and that was mostly to drop some sites in rank.. People that bought backlinks on PR5 and PR6 sites got their hands Slapped...

The thing about page rank, many webmasters use it to decide who they want to trade with. You often have to have a minimum PR to get a link trade. It seems to me webmasters put a lot more significance in PR than Google.

PageRank is still important, just not the PageRank we see in things like the Google toolbar. PageRank is still part of the overall algorithm they use apparently. As the guys mentioned above, having a high (or low) PR is no indication of potential traffic to your site.

Interestingly the word 'Page' in PageRank actually refers to the name of it's creator - Larry Page. It's just conincidence that it looks like it refers to website 'pages'.

page rank is to me worthless for the most part,my pr2 and pr3 sites get much less traffic than my pr0!

They should probably have called it "LinkRank" in the first place, from my understanding of it. I wonder had the creaters name not been "Page" what they would have named it?

Good question. I've been trying to think of something funny to replace it but I'm coming up short ;)

Here you go.
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page[1] and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.

- Yan