You might have noticed that there has not been a major PageRank update since the first weekend of April. This has broken the longest ever time that Google has gone before of not updating the PageRank toolbar by a couple of weeks and we’re still counting.

So, has Google given up updating PageRank and would it really matter to the internet if it had? Well, I think the answers are “No” and “Yes”.

No, Google has not updated for a long time, but there have been minor corrections. I redirected a site to a grey barred page only a couple of weeks ago and that page now shows the original page’s PageRank. So minor corrections are taking place, just not the major update that a lot of people are waiting for.

Would it matter? Well SEO experts will tell you that directly the answer is “No”. But then, how many of them are buying paid posts from PayPerPost, InPostLinks and so on? And you can bet they are willing to pay a lot more to a PR4 blog than a PR0 blog.

So to those buying & selling links, PageRank is a major factor. There are other factors we could use, such as the number of inbound links (from Google or Yahoo), the Alexa rating or general traffic stats, but these all report on the behaviour of the entire site.

It would be simple to create a quality website and then start to sell links on a blog that is a sub directory of the website and all measures apart from PageRank would reflect what is happening on the main area of the site. The blog could be virtually hidden from view or blocked in some way and the only measure of this is its PageRank.

So I do not think that Google has quite given up on PageRank, not just yet. There are too many small corrections. But I could foresee a future in which it might just happen and the world of sponsored blogs could be turned upside down for a short while.