PR is a number that represents the support your page has. The more support, the higher your PR.

Support is built out of votes from other pages, with some votes counting far more than others.

The PR value in the Google toolbar is not the real PR value stored by Google, but a much simplified indicator, that does not take into account the logarithmic nature of the real scale.

It is easy to move from PR 0 to PR 1, but it then gets progressively more difficult to move up the scale.

Links from other pages pass PR to your page. However, the amount of PR passed depends on the PR of the original page, plus the number of outbound links on the page. The more links on a page, the less PR each link gets.

Not all pages of a given toolbar PR are equal. A good PR 4 page can pass you almost as much PR as a low PR 5 page. A low PR 4 page will only pass on as much as a good PR 3 page.

Hopefully you have followed this. It is not vital that you understand how PR is calculated, but the basic principles of how it is accumulated and used, is important.

You should be able to see the value of links to your pages, as well as see how some links are more valuable than others.

In the next section we will discuss link reputation. This works hand in hand with PR. Whereas the PR tells the search engines how important a page it, Link reputation tells the search engine what topic your page is important for.