Well it has finally come, the Google PageRank update is now underway. This has been the longest time between updates, which normally occur 4 times a year. However it appears there will only be 3 updates this year. The possible reason for this is due to the popular belief that PR represents very little in terms of quality of the page, and the fact that PR has generated a whole marketplace of webmasters selling links to pass PR juice. Unfortunatly Google has now decided to take a stance against sites using paid links, and sites that use paid links can be reported as spam. It is assumed that this stance against paid links means that Google will now be reducing the value of links it thinks are paid for and has led to many sites losing PR or not gaining any (for example our homepage stayed at PR4).
While it is nice to have a large PageRank in reality it provides nothing more than braging rights. It has no effect on the position of a site in the search engine results pages. For example Undetected is ranked in the top ten of Google for Satellite Navigation, and only has a PR of 3. Wikipedia, Halfords and Tesco all have a PR of 5 or 6 yet rank lower on the results pages for this term.
Other thing to note with PR is that the PR juice flows within a website much better then from seperate sites. For example our Homepage is PR4 and even though we have not built any links to our services page, the PR juice from the homepage etc has given it a PR4 also.
*Edit*
I forgot to mention that it seems that pages created before 30 September will of head Page Rank passed onto them(pressuming PR was due)