Google Page rank no longer in webmaster tools

Google Pagerank has been branded by some as the 'comfort blanket and SEO noobs' (soruce:Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim ) The facility to see waht pages have low medium and high page rank has been removed from the google webmaster tools. The presumed reason for this is that google wants people not to focus too much on page rank, which although important, is only a fraction of the algorithm used to rank pages in the SERPs. Indeed, google would like to remove page rank altogether from the public, because too much emphasis is placed on it. In google's own FAQ's it says:

"#pagerank
Q: My site's PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. If you're looking for metrics, we'd encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business."

Some people argue that the move to remove the facility from webmaster tools is part of a long term strategy to remove page rank indicators altogether.

While some might argue that having page rank not only validates the website in terms of trucst (would you buy something from an unranked site?) it also gives webmasters some indication of how much google likes their site.

Personally, I would like to see a more useful indicator in the toolbar, for example, if a site (or single page) is penalised by google for some infraction of its rules, whether its something minor like perceived oversaturation of keywords, or something more serious like malware or phishing. Something like a traffic light indicator, then have that link to a page which can tell you why it's got an amber or red status. Its very difficult to tell if a site has been penalised in the rankings sometimes. If your site suddenly drops from page 1 of the results to page 3, this can have a devistating effect on online business, and often you dont know whether this is because the site has been penalised, whether a detrimental ranking algorithm update has taken place, whether some intercontinental router has directed the googlebots to a wrong ip address or whether some more sinister forces have been at play.