tedster - 7:05 pm on Dec 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

There is "real" PageRank and there is what the toolbar shows. Real PageRank is continually updated and calculated out to many decimal places. And it does matter, both for ranking and for staying out of the Supplemental Index - although there are quite a few other factors involved as well.

Although toolbar PageRank is a somewhat rough indicator of real Page Rank, it also can be quite strange, sometimes buggy, and always out of date. It's not worth nearly the amount of focus that people sometimes give it.

Search traffic matters. Rankings produce that traffic, so ranking matters. If pages are ranking and producing good traffic for a website, then it really doesn't matter what the toolbar shows. If there is a ranking or traffic problem, then toolbar PR might give you some clues as to what is going on. Or it might not - as I said, it's sometimes buggy and only a historical picture at best.