Silly Googlebot, PR is (not) for Kids
This is really lame.± Why do the Muckromedia and Adobe web sites each garner PR10* and Microsoft only a 9? And that's not the worst of it. Real.com also gets a PR10? Hello, exsqueeze me--baking soda. Dude, that is just wrong. Not only is their player a piece of cheese but the site is not that grand. Come on Googlebot, crawl yourself out of that one.
So then I got curious and did some poking around. I thought I'd query a few popular, established web sites. Sites that are known to have lots of content, heavy traffic and loyal and diverse visitors--and a couple others just for a heck of it. I present you with Cameron's Imprompu PageRank Survey - May 2006 Edition
How does a site get a PR10? Very carefully. Seriously, they earn it. You won't find very many PR10 sites. The ones you do come accross will all have a few things in common: Great content, many years of service and thousands of pages linking to them.
Of course, some doofus dingleheads don't like to wait or earn a higher page rank. There will always be blackhat tricks (like this one -- no longer works) to instantly hit 10. WARNING: Do not try these at home kids. When you're caught your site will be blacklisted.
Or you could be a total loser like KinderStart and sue Google over your Pagerank. Now that is lame. Here's a novel idea, why don't they take responsibility for their site's suckiness. It's not Google's fault.
± Google search has gotten stale as of late. Maybe being fired by Amazon will help to wake them up. (A9 also provides some nice features like blog and book searches.) This year I finally had enough of seeing the same poorly designed web sites ranking on google's page one...sites that are not really all that useful. I started using Yahoo! and Live.com. Overall, Yahoo's results contain more high quality links IMO.
* A "PR" or "Pagerank" is Google's way of scoring a web site. The Pagerank scale is 1-10 with 10 being the highest. If you have the Google Toolbar installed you can see the rank of every page as you visit it.