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Page rank is a phrase that is used probably as much as any other, when it comes to getting promotion on Google. The magic mark out of ten is a measure of how great your page is, in Google's eyes. Consequently, search engine optimisation (SEO) advisors often use it as a barometer.

Google, however, says to pay the PR no attention when deciding what sites to link to or to seek links from. Some experts say that you should only link out to websites with a high page rank (say 4 or above) and try to get those sites to link to you - in addition to ensuring those sites are relevant to the content on your own site. If all that were true, then most people would have an extremely limited number of options for linking to other sites.

A member of Google's staff, speaking recently in interview, said webmasters should not live their lives by the page rank. "Everyone wants traffic to their website, so they should just try to get as many sites to link to them as possible, regardless of the page ranks." She did add, though, that relevance is important. A link from a football site to an article on your site about football is highly relevant, whereas a link from a cricket site to your blog about making cakes has no relevance at all. Unless they are cricket cakes.

Page rank was devised by Google as a way to get an understanding of how good a page is. You will note that top media sites like BBC News, CNN, Google itself have very high ranks - this is because they are accessed by a massive amount of people, are linked to by millions of websites, and are generally full of good information. The PR is like a visual confirmation that it's a popular resource - kind of like looking inside a library book to see it has been borrowed far more than other books.

The advice from the Google staffer mirrors this company's view that it is far better to focus on building a good website that many people will want to visit than to concentrate on tweaking things just to boost page rank. Content truly is king.