Are there any sites, tools, or software that can show the current PR of a page? I hear that google can take months to update its toolbar PR. Is this true?
Toolbar PR is the current PR that Google has publicly displayed for viewers to see. Their is no way of seeing CURRENT PR unless you work at Google or know someone that will tell it to you I guess. Check my sig link for a few PR tools.
Yes there are services that may show futurepageranks and current ones too. http://www.futurepagerank.net/ But it's only a prediction tool. Also there is http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
Well there are many sites which has tool to predict future PR , but PR is not essential at all to rank well.
there is a tool where you can see your live PR, its a fire fox extension where you can see your real PR but after the recent update http://livepr.raketforskning.com/live-pagerank-no-longer-works.html
from what I see the whole PR thing is currently in limbo, hopefully they will all stabilize and show the same results soon.
Future PageRank prediction tools use very simple algorithms that make their predictions, for the most part, based on the links you have. There may be some other factors thrown in, but link quantity and the PR of those links are the two overwhelming factors. In the real world, Google PageRank is logarithmic, based on the total number of links in the Google index. That means that if you have the exact same links from one update to the next and the total number of links indexed by Google goes up your PageRank could go down. Transversely, if the total number of links indexed by Google goes down your PageRank could go up. Obviously there are a lot of other factors in play here, but the bottom line is that there is no way for PageRank prediction tools to accurately include the growth of the Internet into their equations unless the tools are themselves utilizing accurate sampling technology.
The current page rank is not available any longer. I't seems pretty certain the current rank was displayed for "a bit", But according to matt cutts, the current page rank was turned off, and will not be turned back on. IMO we had a bit of insight into future page rank, but the party is over! ------------------------------- http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/page/2/ Q: “Is the RK parameter turned off, or should we expect to see it again?†A: I wouldn’t expect to see the RK parameter have a non-zero value again. Q: “What’s an RK parameter?†A: It’s a parameter that you could see in a Google toolbar query. Some people outside of Google had speculated that it was live PageRank, that PageRank differed between Bigdaddy and the older infrastructure, etc.
If your site is listed in DMOZ the biggest secret is that your live PR is listed in google directory I found this pretty accurate... before it predicted my site as PR5 (down from PR6) and hey it happened... now after hard work it predicts my site as PR6 again... and i think next update i will get my PR6 back
In my experience, those pr predictors don't seem to work that well. Some of them are based on some query results that people are speculating has to do with the real page rank. I've emailed a company that made one of these tools that uses this query result and didn't get any response. I suspect that they didn't really know the answer.