How do websites get their pagerank to start with?

I know that websites provide pagerank juice from backlinks and those backlinks get their PR from their backlinks, my questions is where does all this pagerank originally come from??? it has to come from somewhere originally... if i had one website with a pagerank of 0 and had a thousand backlinks that also had a pagerank of 0 will that affect my page rank? will it increase or decrease? or do nothing at all? im very interested to hearing all your thoughts and oppinions.

Think of PageRank as water. You have a webpage that was PR3 - so considerable amount of water. Now, when you get a link from that webpage to your website, the PR flows to your site too, just like water.

Now, the problem is - How much PR would flow to your website. Now, the answer to that depends on the Number Of Outbound (going to other websites) Backlinks on that webpage. For example, you find a wordpress post with PR3 and you see that it has almost 50 outbound links + 10 inbound links (internal links to other pages of that website). Now, the water has to be distributed amongst 60 people. THe links at the top of the page - in other words - links in the body of the article get most preference.

So if your comment ( linking back to your website ) is at 40th position, you would see NO change in your website's PR. Eventhough there is some PR flowing to your website, but it is not enough to even make it PR 1 yet.

As for the where PR originally started, it was all designed by google. Google back in 2002 came up with this term PageRank which actually was a measure of how authoritative a website is, how good the content is and what kind of backlinks it has. Google made an algorithm change and started giving PRs to all the website. Websites with HIGH PR started ranking on the top. Which is why, people went crazy over PageRank in 2006-07. Now, people know how to get their websites a higher pagerank and it is being manipulated by webmasters each day, because of which PR is not a critical component in getting your website ranked for a lot of the terms. But, PR still is a very relevant parameter when it comes to some highly competitive keywords.

If you would like to increase your PR - Get ******** backlinks from blogs and other websites that have high PR. But, don't make your backlink portfolio full of just ******** backlinks, get nofollow links as well to make it look natural. And as they say, Slow and Steady, Wins the race !!

Keep building your backlinks, and you will win the race.

Thanks daserpent, that was one very informative reply. Much appreciated.

You say that Pagerank is not a critical parameter to rank high in the search engine, do you mind sharing some other parameters that can help rank a site?

I am guessing the Domain and Quality of content would be the only ones I know of.

There are a lot of factors, some are :

1) Content - Most important
2) On-site SEO, optimizing the website to make the content be indexed easily, make the website easy-to-navigate.
3) off site seo = backlinks, types of backlinks and deep linking the pages.

These are just few of the factors. Ofcourse there is MUCH more to be discussed and mentioned.

I have been doing SEO more than 3 years now, and I know that I just cannot explain all the things that I have learnt in 3 years in just 1 page. If you want to learn a lot more about SEO, refer to SEObook.com , SEOMOZ.org etc They have helped me tremendously.