Now if you are saying that guys like me, Aaron Wall, Minstrel, Michael Martinez, incrediblehelp, webnauts,HHI Golfguy have all missed the biggest news story in SE History then I guess we had better start over again.
Hey buddy - thanks for the mention
I'll drop in my two cents on this one. To me, toolbar is more a function of link popularity rather than a function of the authority or trust of the web site. Look at it this way, there are a lot of sites that have high toolbar PR but not a lot of trust or authority. For example, if I was a retailer a link from Wal Mart's PR7 page would have a lot more impact than Billy Joe Bob's House of Trinkets PR7 retail web site.
Quality link building and getting links to help you improve SERP's is a LOT harder today than it was 6 months ago. If your link program is based upon toolbar PR and quantity of links you're going to spin your wheels trying to get top rankings for competitive keywords.
When I look for links my primary concerns are the authority value of the site as it relates to certain keywords, the relevance of the page my link will be on for a given site, and a few other things that I think are important.
What I don't care about is toolbar PR. There are plenty of PR3 sites with great rankings and what I consider to be authority value. Furthermore, it doesn't bother me that a page my link will be on is supplemental. Why? First, even if a page is supplemntal Google knows about the link. In fact, my outbound link may even help that page. Second, if I think it will help the link pointing to my site I can point my own links from other sites to that supplemental page.
In case any of you missed it, Google recently fired a "warning shot" (quote by Matt Cutts) at a specific group of real estate web sites and their linking practices. Link building for SERP's will get even tougher in the near future.
