PageRank is a measure of importance of a website Google uses which is a scale of 1 to 10. Where 10 is the highest. A high PR does not always assure high ranking for your targetted keywords. All other SEO factors like keyword density, code to content ratio still are what you look at in ranking, but for two websites with nearly the same value, quality, quantity in various SEO factors, the site with the higher Pagerank will most probably rank higher. Pagerank can be viewed like a measure of credibility. And if your website gets links from high PR website increase it’s own PR as well.
Pagerank if updated often, although I am not sure how often it is updated, but what is displayed on Google’s toolbar is not as updated as you think. Google Pagerank changes 3 to 4 times a year, about every 3 to 4 months. The next PR update is expected sometime this coming January 2007. To check the PR of various websites, you can simply install the latest Firefox browser with the Google toolbar. It’s a safe and secure browser and the Google toolbar will have even more useful tools aside from the Pagerank display alone.
When there is a Pagerank update, not all Google datacenters are updated right away. And my favorite Pagerank checker on various Google datacenters is here.
There also has been some reports that the Pagerank can be faked, and there are some blackhat SEO websites, blogs and forums out there saying how to cheat Google Pagerank, and basically all it is doing is displaying the Pagerank of another website and showing in the browser another website. But it has also been reported in SEO communities of Pagerank errors where some websites mysteriously get extremely low or extremely high PR for no known logical reason at all. And even I have just experienced that with another website of mine that barely has inbound links from other websites. It has large amount of internal linking all from the same domain and it was given a PR7 for some reason. Getting links from other high PR websites is the objective of many SEO professionals that they decide to buy links from other websites. While some websites who are really into SEO, willing sell links. And as the higher the Pagerank of a site gets, the higher the price get as these are very much sought after links that come from these high Pagerank good place to buy links are from Text Link Ads. They are sorted by topic and you can also view the Pagerank, Alexa traffic and all other details of the site. SEO is said to work best if the links you get are from site with similar topics.
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Get an RSS feed from one site that updates frequently. Display the feed on your page and ping Technorati. Technorati updates their listing and displays you as a recent post. And give it a URL. Then when the site is viewed by someone else aside from Technorati, display another website. I believe you can do USER_AGENT checking, IP checking or HTTP_REFERER checking to display another site.