Have You Checked Your Google Page Rank?

Someone asked me yesterday what is Google Page Rank? Google ranks websites on the web by many factors from 0-10. The page rank was invented by Larry Page when he was at Stanford University.

This image above of the page rank algorithm is courtesy of Wikipedia. What are some of the contributors to the ranking of a Google Page Rank for your website or blog?

Links - How many links are going into your website for support

Authority - Like a cnn.com or .gov or .edu - Things out of your control for the most part

Probability - Probability of people clicking on links to get to your website - through the use of Search Engine Optimization on your website or blog

Internal Links in Your Own Website - If you have properly linked your own pages and people go from page to page and not leave your website

How can you check yours and other websites page rank? They are several ways and my favorite is installing any of the follow toolbars on your brower:

Web Rank Toolbar

SEO for Firefox

Search Status for Firefox

SEO for Chrome

Is Google Page Rank important anymore? There is a dispute among webmasters and most say it's not that important. But it will establish the crawl priority and crawl depth of a website. It is also a tool some webmasters still use to decide whether or not to link to your website. When we first started our storefront no one responded to our email requests for links on our resources page. Today we get emails daily asking us to link.
It used to be that Google changed Page Rank on a monthly or quarterly basis, it is now done randomly. I noticed this website got a 2 ranking last week and our storefront went from a 3 to a 4. There are few websites that have a ranking of ten, like Google itself and Facebook. See more 10 ranked websites here.
Have you checked your Google Page Rank lately?