Page rank is a rank Google use to assign a relevance to your page and the search term being searched for.
If you are looking to increase your page rank, we have put together a list of factors which influence the algorithm. Each criteria has a score of relevance or an importance factor to better enable you to work on different factors that add up to the overall score.
You should also keep in mind that it is not a hard and fast rule to live and die by in obtaining relevance within your site. If you have good relevant content, in relation to what the user is searching for, and the site and copy is well optimised, your pages will rank in the corresponding search.
Page rank overall is in our opinion only one criteria Google looks at when finding relevant content to the searchers query. Above all is quality and relevance of content, if it is on subject, well put together and an attention to SEO has been taken into consideration, your pages will be found.
Moving on to the calculations that make up the Google page rank, now only the powers to be really know the entire inner workings to page rank, as far as we know no actual release of the internal working of the Google page rank have been released.
Below is the actual Google page rank algorithm that was released during the developmental stage of Google. This is as much as anyone has as far as we know, but is enough to serve our purposes.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))
In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.
A simplistic view of this can be seen as
a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it)
Share = The linking page's PageRank is divided by the number of outbound links
A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value will be shared equally between all pages.
This equates to it would be better to get a page linked to your website that has a PageRank of 5 with 2 outbound links then it would be to have a page linked to you with a PageRank of 8 with 500 outbound links. With all things considered it would be better to have both of these sites linking to yours, but if you can only have one, then it becomes clear.
Google PageRank algorithm is based between a PR of 1 to 10, but many people believe that these numbers are set to an algorithmic logarithmic scale. Furthermore there is a very good reason to think this, but no one knows for sure outside of Google. It is probable that people have already figured this out, but the only way to be certain would be to duplicate the algorithm yourself.
Google PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page, and Sergery Brin. This was part of a research undertaking for these two people. The project was started in 1995 and then led to a functional prototype. In 1998 Google was born and the rest is history in the making.