Google rolling out toolbar PageRank update

The whole PageRank issue is confusing for many people. A few weeks ago Google removed PageRank information from its Webmaster Tools service, and this went largely unnoticed by many webmaster and bloggers.

This is a quote from a Google employee in answer to a question about why the feature has been removed.

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

During the past few days Google has been in the process of rolling out the latest toolbar PageRank update. Despite many experts in the search industry discounting the importance of this information, there are others, such as those interested in generating links, either through link exchanges (yes, they still exist) or through “buying advertising”, that consider the PageRank of a site/page to be a significant indicator as to its quality.

It seems to that the only way to stop PageRank obsession is to remove the indicator from the toolbar.