tedster - 12:15 am on Mar 14, 2010 (gmt 0)

The best indicator I know of today for how much Google values your pages is how often they spider each one. And even that's not infallible because a strong page that rarely changes may stop getting checked as often. Not only that, but it's pretty hard to see such information about your competition.

So your natural recourse is to monitor the search traffic that you actually get from Google. Server log analysis was never more important. Not just "up or down" but really digging into the full search phrases your traffic is using and what pages they find by those searches. There's absolute gold in there.

I agree that TBPR is of minimal value - but I still find some value there, especially when all I want is a general ballpark idea of what's going on.