Literally millions of blogs and forums have questions and statements regarding PageRank and the Google PageRank toolbar.
There also seems to be a HUGE focus on the Google PageRank toolbar from people trying to increase their popularity with the search engines, and in my opinion taking it way to seriously…. in fact, scratch that… even Google says that you should not take it too seriously!
PageRank is vital, and is one of the key ingredients in a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) campaign, but what is the difference between PageRank and the PageRank toolbar?
PageRank is a internal scoring system that Google uses to identify how popular your webpage is based on how many other webpage’s link to yours and their popularity. This is CONSTANTLY updated by Google, and as their spiders crawl websites throughout the world the PageRank scores are calculated. As your PageRank score increases so will your position in the listings in a search.
The Google PageRank Toolbar on the other hand is substantially different. The PageRank toolbar is a reflection of your score at a particular time. Google only updates the PageRank toolbar 3 or 4 times a year and webpage’s are scored between 0 -10.
Getting a score of 0 or 1 is relatively quite simple with only a few links pointing to you, however each step from there becomes more and more difficult. It’s also important to understand that two websites that may both have a PR3 (PageRank) may be on totally opposite sides of the scale. The first webpage may have only just made the cut to be classified as a PR3 while the second webpage might have only just missed the cut to becoming a PR4. Google’s internal scoring method would still consider the second webpage more important as its internal scoring is far more granular.
So in conclusion, PageRank is vitally important for higher listings in the search engines and a major component of a good SEO campaign and is updated constantly by Google. The Google PageRank toolbar is a nice indicator that will show you how your link building campaign is doing, but it will only show you a snapshot of your webpage at a certain point in time and should not be taken too seriously. Of course, everyone likes to see this number increasing over time 
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April 8th, 2010 10:42 am
[...] mentioned in a previous post Difference between PageRank and PageRank toolbar There is a major difference between the Google PageRank update, and the Google PageRank Toolbar [...]
May 3rd, 2010 9:30 pm
Page Rank is always a popular topic for webmasters that are starting to dabble in search engine optimisation. I wrote a post recently about Page Rank Score and Guest Blogging due to someone refusing to guest post on a site with a low Google PageRank score. This seems quite extreme to me because, as you say, PageRank is dynamic and not a static element. Great post about the distinction between the PageRank and the Google Toolbar PageRank.
Regards,
Karl
May 4th, 2010 10:57 am
Hi Karl,
It certainly is a hot debate topic and one that should be addressed but not taken too seriously. There are a lot of factors for a good SEO solution and yes PageRank is certainly one thing… but it’s not the only thing…
One point about posting on a low PR webpage / website… it may have a low PR value now, but there is always the chance that it ends up with a really high PR later, so the time taken to make a comment is always worth the effort
Thanks for the feedback,
Jay