Google Toolbar 

The Google Toolbar is a very handy application that is used by millions of people. It has a few useful features such as being able to do a search within it but the one feature that interests most Internet marketer's is the Page Rank icon.

First you may be wondering what Page Rank is? Page Rank (which I will now refer to as PR) is what Google applies to each and every web page.

Read that closely, they apply it to every web page rather than every website. Page rank goes from 0 to 10 with 10 being the highest.

Only a few websites get to a PR10, two of them are Google.com and Facebook.com

Then you get PR9 sites such as Youtube.com (will probably get to a 10) and yahoo.com.

So what actually is Page Rank? Well in my own words not Google's Page Rank is an indication as to how important a website or page is in the eyes of Google.

In order for a website to gain Page Rank it needs links from other websites. The more links you get the higher your PR goes as PR is flowed through links.

But of course not all links are equal, if you get loads of links from PR0 pages they're no where near as valuable as a handful of links from pr5 pages.

This brings me back to my point at the top, Google ranks pages not websites. For example you may have a PR4 website but some of the inner pages will only be PR0, the entire site is not a PR4.

A classic misconception that inexperienced webmaster's have is that they're getting "PR6,7 and 8 links" when they spam forums.

They use automated programs that automatically sign up to forums and will then create a profile page on the forum and leave a link back to their site.

The home page of the forum may be a 6,7 or 8 but the page where their link is placed will be PR N/A and it doesn't get lower than that.

That's a very brief description of PR, there's lots more to it than I just explained.

You find that there's lots of speculation and propaganda around the Internet with regards to PR and how important it is in terms of Google search engine rankings but the truth is that only Google technicians know for sure.

Regardless of how important it is I recommend that you Download The Google Toolbar as it's very handy.