We were talking about Google PageRank the other day when we all got together in Chicago so I thought I’m bring it up here. 
This icon shows my rank and should change automagically if/when my rank changes (archived pages do not necessarily rank the same, see below). Today it’s a five, the scale goes up to ten, but it’s a huge jump for a page/site to grow. You can check you PageRank at PRchecker.info. Or include it on your site with the little piece of code that they list on the bottom of their page
So I can see I have different ranks on my archived pages, as of today:
Getting from 4 to 5 didn’t take long… the jump from 5 to 6 took forever.
I was a 7 for a while, but then they changed something and I dropped back down to a 6, probably never to return.
Not to be a downer, but: Hasn’t Google been insisting that PR doesn’t signify as much as Webwatchers think? (Which begs the question of why they maintain it in the first place…)
Dunno about its validity, but I am a 5. Wow. Never would have expected.
These pages gives a way technical explanation of how it worls…
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank