The higher the impact factor, the more highly ranked the journal. It is one tool you can use to compare journals in a subject category. The impact factor is a measure of the frequency of citations per publication in a specific journal.
This depends the way you think and your context. Despite numerous drawbacks appear with numerical measures used for calculating the article/journal impact, these are useful to get an approximate idea about where the considered journal stands in your field. However, in case of IF, your comparisons will be limited to the journals indexed in SCI, SCIE, and SSCI. Whatsoever, I believe that journals indexed in these databases are not merely selected. They are filtered by a criteria to drop low quality publications. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that the journals indexed in these databases have some standard, but still there could be highly reputed and influential journals which are not indexed in these databases. The level of considering the IF may depend on researcher, subject domain, affiliation, and so on.
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