The webmaster community has been on edge for the past few weeks speculating on the future of Google Page Rank. Most SEO’s estimated that a Google Page Rank update should have taken place by the end of July or beginning of August to the latest. But as day after day goes by and no update apparent the community is flooded with rumors and speculation as to what is going on. Some point out that while Page Rank has been known to update itself around once every 3 months (with the intervals spreading out with each update), there have been cases in the past, especially around this time of year where the update took longer.

It is important to note that the actual Page Rank of each site is considered to update by Google much more often with suggestions by Google spokespeople indicating approximately a weekly update. The only thing that happens with a quarterly update is the export of the current Page Rank values to the Google toolbar.

Truth to be said Google would be quite happy to remove this famous little green bar from their toolbar as it just invites circumventing of the system and encourages the purchase and sale of links. In fact, the last few weeks have shown signs of a slow period in text link sales as people are waiting for the update to see the actual value of what they are purchasing (the current data is almost four months old and may not be correct anymore). But they know just too well that removing the Page Rank indicator from their toolbar will be removing the main reason why millions of people worldwide bother to keep their toolbar live on their browser.

The recent delay in the Page Rank update has also generated some more extreme rumors suggesting that Google is not only reconsidering the display on the toolbar but actually how they measure Page Rank itself. Some suggested they had a source inside Google confirming that the current Page Rank system will be replaced by what they call Web Rank which will give much more weight to factors such as content and relevancy. But none of this has been substantiated by anyone in Google and as some bloggers have pointed out Web Rank is a Yahoo trademark making it quite unlikely that Google will be using such a name.