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The Google Page Rank indicator is in the news again. Last week people began to notice that the page rank on many of their pages was dropping once again and of course that meant that it was time to run around like demented fairies proclaiming that, despite their innocence, Google hated them.

Here in Australia it even hit the pages of our national newspapers when two well-known Australian bloggers - Darren Rowse and Yarro Stark - were interviewed about it. Darren Rowse felt that a drop in page rank would mean that he would lose credibility and some might not see him as the guru that he really is.

Yarro Stark felt that it would mean that he couldn't charge as much for advertising on his site if his Page Rank dropped. Now isn't that sad, here we have that horrible little green bar that really is an indication of absolutely nothing having such an impact around the world when someone at Google, with way too much time on his or her hands, has a little fiddle and drops everyone's page rank down a notch or two.

Let's face it - that green bar has not been an indication of anything worthwhile for some years now so why are we getting our panties in a bunch over something that is pointless and can be manipulated by Google to suit its own ends?

For that matter how many ordinary people out there in Internet Land have that green bar installed? And if they do have it installed do they every bother to look at it?

As for us webmasters ... well we should just know better shouldn't we? We should remember that it has very little meaning and not get flustered when someone at Google plays with it.

I mean does that little green bar really have much affect on where your sites and pages rank in Google? Does a low page rank number mean that you won't be able to rank well for search terms that are important for you?

I think not ... but then I don't claim to have any guru-like status when it comes to search engine optimisation. What I can claim though is personal experience through pages and sites that Steve and I have worked on.

On Saturday afternoon when I first read the article in the newspaper here in Australia I wandered over to one of our sites ... it's a site that Google particularly likes and we often use it to get other new sites indexed rather quickly.

So what did that horrible green bar show? It showed that our site had been dropped down to a PR 3 but was that really a signal that we should start running around yelling and screaming?

Absolutely not and if we were in any doubt we could test it quite easily. On Saturday morning Steve had put a link up to a new site that we had released on Friday for a client. As I said, it's what we normally do when we want Google to find a new site and this time, even though the site we used had seen a decline in PR, Google was still following links from the site and regularly crawling the site too.

On Saturday morning Steve had used some anchor text for that link and by Saturday afternoon we were at the top of page in the Google search engine results for that anchor text, by Sunday the new site had been crawled and by Monday morning the new site was at the top of the search engine results pages for the anchor text!

So I'd urge you not to worry about your page rank at all ... it really is meaningless. Who really cares about being a guru if you need to show it by your PR? And if you can't sell advertising on your site on anything else than your PR then you really shouldn't be in the marketing business at all.

So forget bout page rank and that horrible little green bar and, instead of running around like a headless chicken then next time someone at Google wants to play silly buggers with page rank, just get on with the real business of achieving good results in the search engine results pages and making money from those results.

Let the experts and the gurus and the legends in their own lunchtimes go on waffling about page rank and how unjust Google is by changing it yet again. Let others think that Google hates them or Google thinks that they've been doing something black and dastardly.

Let others lose status or lose money simply because their only claim to fame is that horrible little green bar. Ignore them all and just go on making money while they make nothing but a whole lot of noise.