It looks like there is a serious update of the Google PR at present. Since earlier today reports of new page ranks (PR) have been subject of discussion. Of course the update does not happen instantly across all data centres, so it is not that strange to find some people reporting a higher PR than others for the same site.
The burning question for many though is whether PR is as important as it once was.
According to Google PR is:
ageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
The idea behind PR being that a page’s importance is related to the company it keeps.
However this transparency has led to a lot of abuse, with people overtly selling text links on sites based on the site’s PR.
A number of my sites have finally been assigned a page rank, while others have seen their page rank shift, both up and down.
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