A page rank checker is a way to check how much page rank a certain website or webpage has, as well as to verify whether the page rank amount that is showing is a legit number or somehow faked.  A lot of times, people who are trying to make money by selling links on their high page rank page, or people who are trying to sell a high page rank site, will artificially inflate their page rank via shady methods, in order to scam others out of money.  Having a good resource to check suspicious page rank could keep you from getting scammed.

One of the easiest ways to check a site’s page rank is to have the Google toolbar installed on your browser.  The toolbar is available for pretty much any standard browser.  You just need to surf to the web page, and check the page rank amount on the toolbar.  If you want to see the page rank of your competitors in the search engines, then you can get SEOQuake or SEO for Firefox, which are both Firefox addons that allow you to see stats right in the searches for all of the sites that are listed.

So, what is Page Rank?  The original algorithm created by the original makers of the Google search engine, determined that links are like votes, and if a certain web page has a lot of votes, especially from strong sites, then that site becomes a strong site.  The people they link to get a little bit of the page rank, and it flows down throughout the internet, allowing Google to have received a good view of what sites are the most relevant, and popular.  Overtime, this ranking signal began to become less popular because people began trying to cheat it, and Google realized that there are plenty of other factors to take into account for how to rank a website.