Was there really need of making page rank value in public ? Is there any benefit of it except link sale market? When google will disappear it as it did with RK value (suspected very current pr) ? Any comment ....
haha But Google doesn't want to see this industry flourshing because it creates dodge to their alogrithm.
I'd say the fact that everyone is still talking about pagerank makes it deffinately worthwhile for Google to keep it public. PR has been one big publicity machine for them. People on thousands and thousands of websites talking about their company .... forums dedicated to it ..... its good business.
I cannot imagine the big link building market crash, if one fine day google rolls back its PR module.
imo link buyer are interested in pr more when buying costly links like pr7 or pr8. if you review link sale forum at dp you will notice that very few members ask for traffic stats when buying high pr links.
People were selling links long before PR was around and I suspect it would continue. It just means buyers have to do a few more checks. In fact, if PR disappered tommorow, you would see the major link brokers developing evaluation tools to replace it.
I think it was a way for Google to get people to download the toolbar so they can get you searching with out visiting the site. I also think that including the PR was designed to give it a bit of advertising buzz, they imagined people talking and saying things like my favourite music site has a PR of 6 why do you use that other one when it only has a PR of 4? It is a little like when someone has worked in an industry for a long time and assumes everyone is interested in the industry terms and insider info. I believe it was some search engine geeks who felt the world would be interested in the same things they were.