EQUTE — Users of Google Webmaster Tools woke up to see what has become a prevalent statistic for many site owners absent from the webmaster tool set.

Google has discontinued the use of PageRank in the webmaster tool reports, though it still appears in the Google Toolbar — and will likely stay. Google says that they removed it because people were using the ranking as the only statistic that mattered, even though it was far from it.

Though PageRank can still be a good broad measure of a sites performance and an indicator of a change, but most SEO experts know that there are other tools in the webmaster toolset and elsewhere that are updated more frequently and offer more information.