If you herd it on Digitial Point, it must be true. [/sarcasm] Do you believe everything that people say? Seriously.
Maybe google just got tired of the people who turned spamming into business but I don't think it will be completely "disappear", I believe google will still be doing PR calculation as a part of their algo only it's no longer visible to us.
From the google forum: "As Luzie mentioned, we have been updating the Toolbar PageRank (also since April), though it's possible that you don't see it for every URL/site. Obviously seeing so many reports is a bit odd -- I've passed your feedback on to the team here to review. At this time, we are not planning on removing the Toolbar PageRank. It's an important signal for us (but again, it's one out of hundreds of signals), so I think it's good to expose some of that to users. As a webmaster, I think it's an interesting metric, but overall it really shouldn't be a goal. One thing to keep in mind is that PageRank is based on the URL, not the site. Additionally, it's possible that technical changes on your site (or on Google's view of your site) can impact PageRank -- for instance, if your site's URLs move from one domain to another, if we choose a different canonical URL for indexing your homepage, or if pages from your site drop out of the search results for various reasons (downtime, getting hacked, full of ... spam -- hopefully not yours ). These technical issues can happen over time (one way to safeguard against some of them is to make sure that your site uses proper canonicalization techniques from the start). Our systems are generally quite good at recognizing and reacting to them, but you might see the reactions as fluctuations in Toolbar PageRank, even if it doesn't impact your site's crawling, indexing, and ranking. Hope this helps a bit, Cheers John"
I agree. Who knows? Maybe PR Update will happen once a year from now on. If that will happen, PR update might occur on April, 2011. Anyway, that is just my hunch.
Maybe they will come up with another form of pagerank but I think they are planning to limit the pagerank existence .Its all business to Google so they will protect its business first before anything else...
Don't you think it's bad business to focus on something that is so fragile? If they feel like people are abusing pagerank, getting rid of it is the best thing to do. I hope you can find another market to enter, and you should be trying and instead of panicking.
Pagerank will not get off, just read this from the google employee John Mu: "At this time, we are not planning on removing the Toolbar PageRank. It's an important signal for us (but again, it's one out of hundreds of signals), so I think it's good to expose some of that to users."
PR is way too overrated already. It's not that important anymore. So I don't really care if Google gets rid of pagerank.
i quite agree tbh the only people that really care about PR are the ones that dont seem to understand that it dosnt really mean that much. There are so many more important factors to focus on.
I read almost all the replies and is somehow confused, somehow amazed. I myself watching carefully to PR updates, SERP changes and here what I caught. Google trying to improve its positions began losing it. Almost a year ago I paid less attention to bing, yahoo but now there are a huge traffic coming from them. Facebook also plays a great role in the websites' traffic though it is not a SE. What I want to say: for those who keeps their families always have an alternative. They can be Forums, Social Medias, Social websites or bookmarking sites. I turned from PR and concentrated into traffic stats and those people can also do that. Do not go with Google but let Google go with us.