In a recent blog posting by Matt Cutts, the face of Google, he discussed the issue of page rank, and how the number you see on your Google tool bar is really not a very good indicator of how Google measures your web site’s importance at the time you see the rank. This is an interesting admission from someone so high up in the Google ranks. Matt essentially says, what we have all suspected for some time, that page rank is a constantly moving metric, and that Google uses that metric in the placement, but what they show all of us on the tool bar is only a snap shot of the measurement during one point in time. This measurement is only updated to the public a few times a year, but internally it is updated daily if not more frequently.

At some point we take our internal PageRanks, put them on a 0-10 scale, and export them so that they’re visible to Google Toolbar users. … I highly recommend keyword analysis, looking at server logs to figure out new content to add, thinking of new hooks to make your site attract more word-of-mouth buzz, pondering how to improve conversion once visitors land on your site, etc.

As shown with this snippet from Matt Cutts blog, he does not give too much credence to page rank, but rather looks at it as a measure of your back links (page popularity) and suggests that you consider all of the other aspects of SEO, as they all weigh in and become part of the whole that Google and other’s such as Yahoo and MSN will use to rank your page for any specific keyword search.