The Magic Ingredient to Increasing Your Website’s PageRank  - Links, the more the better.
By Bruce Hearder

Google’s Page Rank is a numeric value that Google assigns to websites that shows how  importance Google regards that site. The numbers range from a low of ZERO to a maximum of 10.

Very few sites have a value of 10, with each level being exponentially more importrant than the previous level. A lot of people believe that the higher your sites PageRank is, the higher you will be listed in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
This does not seem to be the case at all..
 
PageRank is based primarily based on links pointing to your website.
 
The problem with linking is that not all links are created equal. A link from a high profile site has much more weight than a link from a start up site. Even with this restriction linking would still be a rather straightforward job. But it doesn’t end here. In order to keep the situation balanced, Google Page Rank also takes into account the number of outgoing links from a specific site, the more they are, the lower the value of the vote for the linked site.

Even with these baroque twists, Google Page Rank is still rather simple to understand. The problem is that a high Page Rank does not necessarily means a high SERP. This happens because the search engine has a moral side to it and it can easily distinguish between a good neighborhood and a bad neighborhood. This is the point where things get really fuzzy and confused, because there aren’t any tools out there to help you make this spiritual decision. You will have to rely on your guts and experience to decide which is which. Intuitively this can be achieved rather easy. If a page looks right, has interesting content and has relatively few links than it is in a good neighborhood, if on the other hand you see keyword stuffing, an improbable amount of links and too many ads, then you are probably seeing a website in a not so very safe neighborhood.

Linking should thus not necessarily aim a high Page Rank, but rather a high SERP. There are even a few voices out there that claim that the Page Rank doesn’t have any value. This is an exaggeration, simply because Page Rank is easier to check than the SERP and is thus used to calculate the fees paid in advertising for example. In the world of linking nothing is exactly what is supposed to be and the more you find, the more you understand that you need to learn further still.