The forums are buzzing with the sound of PageRank Panic.
24 hours ago, I noticed that Google had PR zeroed my sites, but I thought it was just a glitch in my toolbar. Now it seems PageRank has been greyed out for the entire web! Search engine rankings haven’t been affected though.
Is this the end of PageRank? Or at least the end of Google’s willingness to display it in the toolbar? I think Google displaying PR publicly was a mistake to start with - sort of like an invitation for webmasters and opportunists to game them.
The current view is that PageRank is going to be done away with and replaced by Trustrank, which was recently submitted as a patent by Google.
TrustRank is an algorithm which attenuates trust scores from well trusted sources through to other sites throughout the web. It uses human reviewers to compile a seed set of a few hundred or so sites. From these sites and pages trust passes through to other sites.
The PR addicts and PR brokers will certainly be heartbroken if PageRank is proclaimed dead. I for one, will not mourn the death of PageRank Mania and will be glad to see some degree of sanity return to the PR-obsessed SEO world. 
SEO Roundtable has a list of forums where you can go to check out how the chips are falling all over the net.
Oooh what fun SEO is! Never an end to the drama. Just when things were a little quiet, trust Goog to go and shake up the web. 
Update: The Green Is Back! That rather short sabbatical for PageRank had (the less enlightened) webmasters screaming blue murder. And the gremlins will go back to work, selling links. Life goes on…
