Originally Posted by Linkster

Unfortunately as usual people are talking about two different things here

Page Rank is very important to Google - its the basis for their whole algorithm - and is made up of hundreds of factors - but unless youve been studying it for some time you would never be able to come close to guessing a pages "page rank"

PR - (what you see in that little green bar or on some seo website) is meaningless - its just a nice little graphic google makes up to appease the clueless webmasters so that they can catch them selling links - its a snapshot about 3 months behind when Google actually updates Page Rank(on almost a daily basis) - and has been this way for over 2 years

As was said earlier - build a quality site with good content and you'll get the rankings in the SEs you want