As many of you know, page rank is a statistic assigned by the Google search engine and is intended to represent the importance of a certain page. However, there is a lot of controversy surrounding this statistic. For one, it seems to have an unknown bearing on SERP (search engine results page) rankings. For example, searching for Aurora Real Estate in Google brings up a site with a PR of 0 as the #4 organic result. Granted, this is from a site with high traffic rank, and probably high trust rank (two statistics that I’ll probably discuss later), but still….

 The Google algorithm remains a mystery for most of us and the way Page Rank fits into the SERPs is even more unknown. However, many webmasters still see page rank as a valuable tool. Page rank is a desierable factor when requesing reciprocal link exchanges - many sites want a certain page rank in order to consider a trade. While it’s possible for a large corporate website to get a high ranking based upon traffic and trust and zero page rank, it’s fair to estimate that it’s going to be important for the little guys - me and you - to get a fair page rank in order to compete. If the Google algorithm is a combination of factors, having a low page rank might be fine if you’re in the top 1,000 sites for traffic, but if you’re not, you need a combination of factors to help bring your site to the top of the SERPs.