RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web
I feel like no matter how Google or any other search engine ranked pages, SEO firms would be there to game the system and make a mess of the web.  Making Pagerank visible to people with one particular toolbar does seem like a fairly major misstep on Google's part.  The majority of the people who would really care about that are the kind of people you shouldn't be encouraging.<p>One of the obnoxious things about SEO is that if one person is doing it everybody has to do it.  It's not necessarily enough to simply offer a better product at a better price.  Luckily Google does try to reduce the effect of SEO.  I notice for instance that StackExchange almost always beats out Expert Sex Change links these days.