In the SEO community there is a lot of attention paid to PageRank as an indicator of a domain's value. Although it is one of the most important factors in a domain's value in the eyes of Google, there are a few points that should be mentioned.

To begin with, for anyone who doesn't know what PageRank is - it is a metric used by Google to decide how important a domain is based on analysis of link on the internet. Google assigns each page on the internet a score and when one web page links to another it passes some weight onto the page it is linking to. This holds true for both external and internal links. Google PageRank has 11 scores, between 1 and 10. The higher the PageRank, the more likely Google is to trust it. Pages that don't have any PageRank are often referred to as having N/A PageRank.

Probably the most important factor in the distribution of PageRank to a web page is the PageRank of the web pages linking to it. The higher the PageRank of web pages linking to a given page, the higher its PageRank is likely to be. PageRank is generally not assigned to a page higher than the pages that link to it. So, if a page has 4 PageRank 4 and 3 PageRank 3 links pointing at it, it will probably be give a PageRank of 4. It should be noted, web pages that have a lot of low PageRank and PageRank N/A hyperlinks pointing to them can have their PageRank lowered as a result. Sheer quantity of links does not help to increase PageRank. A website can have a high PageRank with relatively few links pointing to it if those links are of a high PageRank.

When it come to sub-pages, time is a factor in PageRank assignment. When new sites first get given PageRank their sub-pages often remain without any PageRank. In general, sub-pages are a little slow to get give PageRank. Google is generally less trusting of sub-pages unless they belong to a trusted domain. In particular websites with a lot of sub-pages and even more so sites that link to a lot of internal pages (like directories) can struggle to pass their PageRank to internal pages.

The structure of the site has a major role to play in the distribution of PageRank. Google uses what is known as block level analysis to pick apart web pages. They use their knowledge of the architecture of the web to decide what links on a page are probably the most important and the pages these links point to are more likely to receive PageRank.

There are those that suggest that the text content of the page affects PageRank assignment, but this doesn't seem to be the case. There is no evidence that text affects PageRank other than pages that have been spammed often have their PageRank reduced.

Google can and do manipulate websites' PageRank. This is generally as a penalty for sites that have used unhonest methods. This can often cause all the site's sub-pages to loose their PageRank. It has also been claimed that in the past Google has made mistakes in PageRank distribution.

Last but not least, the PageRank of a web page may change even though there has been no change in the links pointing to that page. This is either due to changes in the structure of links between all websites or modifications made by Google.