Do you have any ideas about the factors that google take into account for its Page Rank?
Links, Keywords, anything else?
How about other search engines?

I'm sure there are a lot of factors that Google takes into account. I think one of them is backlinks.

I think Backlinks do play an important role in determing the PageRank of a site. Other factors include the Page content, no of outgoing links, Keywords etc.

backlinks definitely ...but from quality and trusted sites.

One more factor taken into account by Google is the "reputation" of the server the site is hosted on, whether there are any other sites that have been banned before.

Really? I think that is pretty poor.
That's like saying someone did bad before you so you've done bad too.

Someone from some server has to be banned at some point unless they are fairly new. Is there anyway someone could go about hunting for this information?

AFAIK that's really not the way Google works. There might be some IP bannings, but even that's quite extreme and would probably be triggered by serious, repetitive abuse/search engine spam.

ok - so a backlink is somone else linking to you - right?

yes sailor

Definitely the back links are what they're using mostly as the benchmark for assigning page rank. I've found that time and persistence will eventually build back links for your site.

Just continue posting good information and participate in discussions and other blogs. Over time other webmasters will give you some love and put a link back to your site. Good luck.

At last I heard 80% of all website traffic was from a search engine, then again 79% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

link back for sure I noticed once i started add my site to my Signatures my ranking started going up

You'd better make them clickable links, otherwise the search engines won't consider them as links.

I noticed my sigture here wasn't a clickable is now

i always assume pagerank not exist. just optmised the site, good content, incoming links, traffic. and the site will get high PR.