What exactly does the PageRank measure?
PageRank is an algorithm (mathematical equation) developed by Google to determine the “importance” of a website based on the incoming linking structure. Every incoming link works as a “vote” for the website. Google doesn’t only measure the volume of incoming links but also analyses the page that casts the “vote/link”. A link from a page that has itself been deemed by Google to be “important” will give the page it’s linking to some of its goodness, or like one of my client likes to call it, some Google Juice.

So where does the PageRank toolbar fit in?
Now the PageRank equation itself is an important factor of Google’s overall algorithm to determine which website should be ranked before another. BUT, what confuses SEOs and webmasters all over the world is the Google PageRank toolbar. Now this is NOT the same thing, the toolbar was created to give an indication of the importance given to a page by Google, but the problem is that people take it WAY too seriously. The toolbar is not updated often enough to actually give you an accurate representation of the givens page “importance” according to the actual PageRank equation. Matt Cutts himself admits that the toolbar is only updated roughly every 3-4 months.

So why do some people obsess about the PageRank toolbar?
Now this could be a number of reasons. For people that are in the area of actually selling outgoing links the actual toolbar PageRank will very much determine what they can charge for that link (although as a pure white hat wearing angel SEO we would never do this, seriously Matt we wouldn’t!). But also, there is a lot of SEOs out there that uses the toolbar PageRank to “prove” success to the clients. As the toolbar is something they can see, so if the PageRank was 5 one month and 6 the next month, obviously that would be an indication you are doing something right.

Now my overall view of this is YES PageRank itself is important as it IS a part of the Google algo, BUT beware of the toolbar, don’t take it so seriously.

But don’t worry, it’s totally normal to get excited when your PageRank does go up, we all do it =)