Page Rank Suggestions
Anon84:       The basic factor is how important your site is. Important sites get higher PageRanks.

Well... that's somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy. Sites that get high PR show up first in search results, which helps them get more traffic, becoming more well known, hence becoming "important".PR solves for your score (self consistently) by basically averaging out all the scores of everybody linking to you while coupling this with a (rather crude) model of user behavior. Of course, this is how it's described in the original paper and definitely very far from what actually goes on under the hood now a days.It should also be noticed that several improvements on/replacements for PR have been suggested over the years, with:TrustRank http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDFBrowseRank http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/tyliu/fp032-liu.p...HITS http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdfbeing the better known ones. Alternatives usually revolve around improving the user behavior model (like including real traffic data in the calculation http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/Papers/click.pdf ), but there is still a lot of work to be done in this field (there's couple of interesting papers coming out in WSDM09 and WWW09 about this).