So Google Surprised Everyone And Updated Pagerank

If you read around the web you will surely have read about the demise of pagerank.

Here's a quote from SearchEngineLand back in August:

Maybe it hasn’t [killed it] technically, but in practice, Google’s failure to update the PageRank values might effectively be killing it, all the same.

And here's a quote from them yesterday:

The SEO community, discussion forums and social media outlets are lighting up with the news that Google has actually updated the Toolbar PageRank values. Why?
(1) The SEO industry always lights up when the most visible indicator and easiest to see metric of Google linkage data changes.
(2) Because no one expected a Toolbar PageRank update this year.