[TuxPirate]

>Think about that—somewhere in Mountain View, someone’s tweaking the little number you see in the Google toolbar. By hand. How accurate is that gonna be?

Certainly more accurate than software failure. Here's the relevant snippet from the source to this claim:

>We have a few safety checks in place, so we say like `OH! Did we expect the page rank of MSN.com to be 7 or 8 and then suddenly dropped to 2...'

>If those sorts of things happen, then we might get an email and check into it. But for the most part the process runs with very little human intervention. People don't really need to oversee things.

The author doesn't show much comprehension of PageRank which is not intended to be a metric solely used for "site ranking" but for crawling rate amongst other things. It's common for lower PR pages to outrank higher PR pages in Google's search results let it be no secret.

Can someone remind me the point of this article because it feels like I completely missed it.

[portentint]

I know plenty about PageRank, honest. The problem is that Toolbar PageRank has almost zero resemblance to true PageRank. Google isn't using toolbar PR to determine crawling, crawl budget or anything else. And even Google's team says the toolbar data is a bad metric. They only keep it because they know a lot of SEOs would start crying if they got rid of it.