Unfortunately, for those trying to exchange links with other sites, among other uses, potential link partners look at the toolbar PR only...
Hey folks, Re: Toolbar: My impression is that PageRank in Toolbar is aimed more at the casual browser of sites who wants to get a general feel for the authority of a page. For this reason many people still believe we should leave it in Toolbar. Toolbar isn't primarily aimed at site owners who are looking for precise & reliable metrics that they can judge their site by or make decisions by. That's one reason it made sense to remove it from Webmaster Tools, which is designed specifically for site owners in a way that Toolbar is not. Personally I would love to see us remove PR from the Toolbar, but mine is not the only opinion in Google and the folks I have most contact with--site owners--aren't the only users or stakeholders of Toolbar. > many people consider PageRank update as an update in their blog's report card Please see the link I posted above for ideas of other, better, "report card" stats. Just because a metric is easy doesn't mean it's worth watching. > it does strike me as a little odd that such a feature would be removed with no public mention Really? It seems odder to me to do a blog post saying "Hey, check out our product--it no longer has X functionality! We removed it because we believe you don't need to pay attention to it... so we're doing this blog post to remind you not to pay attention to it." :-P Seriously, though, we've been recommending for some time now that site owners stop focusing so much on PageRank, so it seemed a natural progression. I'm actually kind of surprised that it created as much buzz as it did. Susan Moskwa, Google Employee - 10/19/09 Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum...n&fid=6a1d6250e26e9e48000475ebf6d79b85&hltp=2
Personally, I don't care one bit about pagerank and never check it. When I'm missing out on link exchange opportunities that might help my sites, that's when I start to care...
I don' think Google stops the major PR update..though I haven't receive mine as well for ages.. I guess they are having a hard time giving updates to all the sites at the same time.. Let's just wait for the next update, if that will happened soon..