Google hasn't updated its PR on the tool bar for some time now, I know "its updating constantly" but most of us aren't seeing any changes. There's been rumours flying around for some time that PR will get the kick and go all together, Google however say this is not the case, they simply wont be updating the PR tool bar as often as they have in the past.
Does Page Rank really matter though? Many web masters and SEO's treat it as the bible, sometimes clicking through websites judging quality solely on PR, by the time Google updates it's PR its already out of date and old news and is not updated again for 3, 6 or even 9 months, in addition to this page rank does not determine a sites quality only the URL quality and technical aspects, so if a website gains some good natural high quality back links soon before or after a PR update and attracts large amounts of natural traffic this wont be taken into account until the next update months away, so just looking at the current PR is in no way accurate.
I still look at a sites PR on first landing, its a habit I cannot get out of, but these days I tend to dig deeper using a combination of other tools and my own judgment to to help me decide weather or not a website/URL is worth getting some link juice from, or how hard will it be to knock off the top spot, how many inbound links does that URL have? are the linking sites any good or are they just full of low quality none relevant content oozing spam? One of my clients has a website with a PR4 and when they first came to me they didn't rank for any of their key phrases or keywords regardless of their healthy PR4, and many of their competitors websites showed PR0 but ranked way above them. Google really doesn't want people seeing PR as the judging factor and who can blame them, after all people have become very good at manipulating page rank.
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