Reconnecting...
FYI: From the Horse's Mouth
Straight from Google. Thought this would be of interest to you.
#pagerank
Q: My site's PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A:
Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update
the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is
our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just
one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled,
indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just
because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. If
you're looking for metrics, we'd encourage you to check out Analytics,
think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or
other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your
website or business.
Quote from Susan Moskwa, Employee of Google: (From Google blog)
"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on
PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most
important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We
removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think
about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should
look at it. :-)
More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here:
http://sites.google.com/site/
Re: Toolbar: My impression is that PageRank in Toolbar is aimed more at the casual browser of sites who wants to get a general feel for the authority of a page. For this reason many people still believe we should leave it in Toolbar. Toolbar isn't primarily aimed at site owners who are looking for precise & reliable metrics that they can judge their site by or make decisions by. That's one reason it made sense to remove it from Webmaster Tools, which is designed specifically for site owners in a way that Toolbar is not. Personally I would love to see us remove PR from the Toolbar, but mine is not the only opinion in Google and the folks I have most contact with--site owners--aren't the only users or stakeholders of Toolbar.
> many people consider PageRank update as an update in their blog's report card
Please see the link I posted above for ideas of other, better, "report card" stats. Just because a metric is easy doesn't mean it's worth watching.
> it does strike me as a little odd that such a feature would be removed with no public mention
Really? It seems odder to me to do a blog post saying "Hey, check out our product--it no longer has X functionality! We removed it because we believe you don't need to pay attention to it... so we're doing this blog post to remind you not to pay attention to it." :-P
Seriously, though, we've been recommending for some time now that site owners stop focusing so much on PageRank, so it seemed a natural progression. I'm actually kind of surprised that it created as much buzz as it did."
Huh? Okay Google, if you say so. I guess we shouldn't obsess over Page Rank.
Now, regarding Meta Tags...
Question asked: " Should the keyword meta tag be optimized for the specific main keywords we are targeting or is it sufficient to just include all possible keywords we intend to target??"
Quote from a Google employee: "Google does not take note of your meta keywords tag. Put good content on your site and Google will pick that up."
This may leave you still questioning what's really going on, but it is direct feedback from Google.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
