"The toolbar pagerank has no influence on your ranking."

Let me clarify that, if I may :) Besides the possibility of the TBPR
being buggy (showing 0 when it should show something else), you're
usually not going to see a big jump in traffic after a TBPR update
because you're seeing something that already was incorporated into the
DCs months ago. That doesn't mean PageRank is a poor ranking factor,
but it does mean you need to look beyond TBPR to measure your SEO
efforts.

For example, suppose on Jul 2, 2007 you write a compelling article
about "how to run 10 racks in 8-ball or 9-ball", where you talk about
the best way to break consistently in 9-ball (which is all you really
need know). It gets linked by a ton of sites, including bca-pool.com,
espnstar.com, worldpoolchampionship.com, and thelifeofriley.org. After
a few days, Google picks up those links and calculates the internal
PageRank of your article "page" (ehem, url) to be 0.3452300123, which
translates to (let's say) TBPR  5. Your page soon starts pulling
traffic for queries like "9-ball", "how to run racks in pool", and "8
ball" mainly due to lots of big boys from the pool niche linking to
your page. But at this point, TBPR reads 0, because Google won't update
that number for another few months.

Ok, now lets say on October 1, 2006, Google exports its internal
PageRanks. I'm not sure how "current" that snapshot is, but assuming
its current on the day PageRanks are exported, say your TBPR goes from
0 to 5.

But wait -- your traffic doesn't increase, and neither does your
ranking. What's up with that? That's because those changes already
happened back in July, a few days after people started linking to your
page. An increase in your article's TBPR will not result in improved
ranking. But keep in mind, the TBPR 5 is an accurate assessment of a
buttload of established sites loving and linking to your article, and
that fact does weigh heavily into how your article ranks.

On Nov 2, 2006, thelifeofriley.org and azbilliards.com decide to remove
their links to your article because - umm I don't know -- you sharked
one of their friends out of $22,312 by fooling him into playing on a
tight-pocket table with a 7-ball spot instead of an 8-ball spot. The
guy has problems paying his mortage, ends up sending his daughter to a
community collage instead of Brown, and now all his friends are pissed.

Due to the loss of those links, your internal PageRank dips to
0.307818723900341, which is, say, still TBPR 5, but just barely. You
notice your ranking drop for "9 ball" from 1st place down to 3rd. The
TBPR still reads 5.

So if the TBPR doesn't change, but you lose your ranking, that must
mean there are other more important ranking factors besides PageRank,
right? Yes, but in this case, no. There was an internal PageRank loss,
but you just can't see it because TBPR isn't granular enough and it
also won't be updated til Jan 2007.

What to take away from all that? TBPR isn't meaningless, but it is
misleading; an increase in TBPR is irrelevant to ranking, but all else
being equal, and assuming the TBPR is current (which is only true maybe
once out of 90 days), high TBPR reflects a clear ranking advantage over
low TBPR.

But what's even more important to remember is that PageRank and TBPR
are both just metrics. Who is the better man? A guy making $10,000 a
year by helping the poor or a guy making $300,000 a year by producing
misleading infomercials? Who is providing a more valuable service? Who
has the more recognizable brand?