PageRank may still be important if you want a high Google ranking

It shouldn't be ignored nor should you fret too much about it.

PageRank calculation, understanding and influence in a real website is very complex making it possible to only generalize on how individual web pages effect others on the same or different websites by virtue of the links in place. Despite this enough intuitive understanding has been developed to be able to guide web marketers.

PageRank is a registered trademark of Google. It is always referred to in its capitalized form on this website when the term relates to Googles intellectual property.

The word Page is named after Lawrence or Larry Page the co-founder with Sergey Brin of Google, the search engine.

PageRank is essentially a system based upon citations of good quality content web pages. The more that a good quality web page is recognized the more will that web page be linked to naturally and for good logical reasons.

Google does not calculate PageRank for a single website. It calculates the PageRank for every page on the whole web (or rather its indexed database) in one sitting at various time intervals.

If the whole web consisted of 1,000,000 interlinked pages and a surfer started clicking on links in a random manner then for a web page having a PageRank of say 1,000 that single surfer in 1,000,000 surfing starts would probably hit the web page with a PageRank of 1,000, a thousand times on average (i.e. the PageRank)

For a site with a PageRank of only 100 the same surfer would hit it ten times less frequently. This kind of thinking puts into perspective the importance of Yahoo with hundreds of thousands of links pointing to it. This was the intuitive thinking behind Brin and Pages theory and PageRank algorithm.

The strength of Google compared to other search engines is that it can do all these vast numbers of link interpretations and then do massive amounts of reiterative calculations at low cost by virtue of the mathematical PageRank algorithm it developed and then patented.