Usually non-technical website maintenance people are the ones who use Google webmaster tools to keep a tab on their sites.  People wound up obsessing over their PR and often times with any dip in PR they would panic and contact Google.

Now that Google has removed the display of PageRank value in Google Webmaster Tools, this kind of scenario is far less likely to happen.

Some years ago Google reportedly had plans of removing PageRank information from the Google toolbar also, but this never happened due to the widespread use of google toolbar as a tool for determining page rank of websites.

This move by Google may have the effect of reducing the number of people trying to manipulate their rankings by buying and selling links on high PR pages and websites. Google seems to be subtly telling that the scoring algorithm that is called Pagerank is something that should not be worried about by webmasters, and that they should rather concentrate on the business of providing landing-worthy content.

So my advice to people is stop fretting about every little bump in the road or every itty bitty backlink.  I always just try to produce quality content.  If you build worthwhile material alot of the other elements will fall into line.  So focus on content and then just keep a slow steady build up of backlinks and other web 2.0 properties, but never fret if you hit a snag these are often times temporary and are nothing to worry about!

Michael R Roberts