Google and Page Rank

Similar to what Google did with the meta tags, rumored for a long time that these were not that important to Google and then they publicly announced that they no longer look at them, page rank has been removed from Google webmaster tools. Google for a long time has indicated that people should not obsess over this factor and now think it inconsistent if included in the webmaster tools. This is not to say that page rank is still not a factor is linking when you want "authority sites" to link to you. This can be determined by page rank. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand provides a good discussion about page rank (a couple of years old but still good info).