The writing has been on the wall for quite some time, but if you’re still clinging to any shred of hope that Google will be updating Toolbar PageRank again, it’s probably time to give it up.

Do you think Toolbar PageRank should go away, or do you still have a purpose for relying on it? Let us know in the comments.

It was pretty clear last month that PageRank is dead, when Google’s John Mueller (who has pretty much taken over for Matt Cutts when it comes to communicating these types of things to Webmasters), said, “PageRank is something that we haven’t updated for I think over a year now, and we’re probably not going to be updating it going forward, at least in the Toolbar PageRank…”

The subject came up again in a Webmaster Help thread. This time he said (via Search Engine Roundtable):

I wouldn’t use PageRank or links as a metric. We’ve last updated PageRank more than a year ago (as far as I recall) and have no plans to do further updates. Think about what you want users to do on your site, and consider an appropriate metric for that.

He also linked to this post from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog from 2011 titled “Beyond PageRank: Graduating to actionable Metrics”.

In that post, Google’ Susan Moskwa said to focus on things like conversion rates, bounce rates, and clickthrough rates, rather than PageRank.

The last PageRank update was actually just under a year ago on December 6th. Even that update was just the result of some other changes. It wasn’t Google just updating PageRank to make it more useful.

So if you don’t count that, you’re looking at close to two years since a legitimate update. It’s been much longer since most in the industry have considered it a legitimate metric anyway.

As you may recall, Cutts talked about PageRank in a video over a year ago, discussing how it no longer has a lot of value, and why your site’s PageRank isn’t changing.

“Over time, the Toolbar PageRank is getting less usage just because recent versions of Internet Explorer don’t really let you install toolbars as easily, and Chrome doesn’t have the toolbar so over time, the PageRank indicator will probably start to go away a little bit,” he said.

The phasing out of PageRank is hardly a surprise.

In another video before that one, he said, “Maybe it will go away on its own or eventually we’ll reach the point where we say, ‘Okay, maintaining this is not worth the amount of work.’”

It seems that Google has reached that point.

Would you like to see Google continue to update Toolbar PageRank, or is this a good riddance situation as far as you’re concerned? Let us know in the comments.

Image via Google