so, if it's "generally not something you need to worry about" why bother Google? I for one, could not care less about a PR udpate. When are we going to rid ourselves of this pretending to be concerned about something that we shouldn't be?

Yeah, page rank is pretty much useless in terms of rankings. I have seen many page rank 4 sites out rank sites that have a PR of 7.

Getting a link from a related site with high page rank, good link partners and at the top of the page does help though. :)

Pagerank will continue to be important because it's the only tangible thing we have to look at and instantly tell the approximate value of the site in Google's eyes. It's how SEOs show their value to customers that don't understand anything about trust and SERPS. Nobody would believe me if I told them - uhm, I got you two out of ten slots in the SERPS for "mcse training", but your pagerank is 0 - and pagerank doesn't matter. Who's buying that? No client I have.

PR is an instant idea of the quality of the site - for SEOs and for anybody. Until we get some other instant indication of whether Google likes the site - it's important.

The alternative we have right now is to do an in-depth analysis on different keywords we think the site should rank for - and see how it does in the SERPS. Who wants to do that for every site? Nobody. If your page rank drops from 5 to 1, is it important to you today? I'll bet you don't feel so good - regardless what your ranking on keywords is.

Pagerank update is real.. MY blog also got a PR update!

Is there any official sign of google that they have finished their PR Update?

If you thought that the update was Google's April Fool surprise, head over HERE to read the April Fool that google played off me in this update. Its quite an interesting episode.

Page Rank is important because of how people will perceive the value of your site. For blogs, the higher it is the more people will think it's worthy to leave their comments with a link to their site so they could get a higher Page Rank. This method will increase your site's popularity because people will keep going there to leave comments, thereby increasing your traffic. So having a high Page Rank will help you get more visitors, whether it's all that important to the search engines or not.

Page rank will be great if Google also panalize sites that link to useless web site to raise their PR. My Site has PR4 and it has always been so however few years back it was 6 but vistors were lot less but now its 4 for past some years but its doing great.

I just given PR2 in the last update
But now when I check it on some PR checker site it shows 0
Anybody knows what's going on??

Many of sites PR get updated, got increase and decrease, and remaining till now. then how can say the PR update was April fool.

Goggle PR testing season is every year same time:first trimester beetween jan 13 and jan 29;the next one is july 6 to july 22;the last is at dec 1

when is the next pr update?

Since the last Google PageRank update was done on January 1, 2010, there are some rumors saying that the next PageRank update will be scheduled by Google somewhere between the March-April period as it is generally updated 4 times a year

There was no PR update on 1st of April 2010.

Yea there was no page rank update.i would least got PR of 1 after the update