PageRank is Googles way of determining a websites worth based on the number of incoming links it has. Essentially, Google counts the number of links pointing to the site and interprets it as confidence votes. Simply put, the more votes for a site, the worthier the site is in the eyes of Google.
Website Ranking
During the years that the web was emerging, numerous sites that have industry-specific content were continuously being added to the web daily. Web surfers or searchers had very few tools to locate these sites which they knew existed but had no idea on how they can be accessed. The birth of Yahoo provided some relief as it organized its directory listing by classifying each site it discovered and likewise embedded a search engine in its site. This started the use of keywords existing in the database for site searching. Other search engines followed suit with the search trend and relied heavily on Meta tags to classify the relevance of a website based on keywords found in the tags.
Everything seemed to work out just fine until site owners and webmasters realized the potential of embedding industry specific keyword phrases in their Meta tags and other...