Google should discontinue toolbar pagerank

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Oct 6, 2007

Hands up if you use toolbar PageRank when you are evaluating the value of a link? I do - I'm guilty as charged. For all it's criticisms and obvious issues, the little green bar does an "ok" job of assessing link value.

If a site looks like it doesn't get much traffic, and it's a PR1, there's no way I'm going to spend time analysing backlinks and checking it's rankings. On the other hand, if that exact same site is PR6, I'm definitely going to take it more seriously when looking for that link. I know for a fact a lot of other webmasters do the same as me on this, so stop trying to tell yourself that it's not important to you.

Yes, I'm well aware that toolbar PR means little in terms of rankings, and it's only updated infrequently etc. This doesn't matter - PR is still the chief measure in determining link value for a lot of people / sites.

No toolbar PR?

Google hates paid links. Really, the best thing they could do to slow down the paid link trade is to remove the mechanism that so many people rely on for valuing links, the toolbar PR.

Backlash

I wonder if this would piss a lot of webmasters off? I'm pretty sure it would. Does Google fear a PR backlash (Public Relations, not PageRank) if they were to disable PR (PageRank, not Public Relations)?

I still get emails from my clients when their PR increases thanking me for my good work. PR is a useful metric to a lot of people, not just SEOs.

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Tags: google pagerank

Comments

Aidan Rogers - Oct 10, 2007

Yip, think we might be all guilty of that. And yeah, yeah we all know – Pagerank is only one piece of the puzzle. But just like magpies are attracted to shiny things, us SEO’s often find ourselves drawn to it: that little green bar.

The only thing I really use it for now though is checking the Google cache, when Googlebot last visited, and if in fact, the page is even indexed at all.

This post reminds me of a fairly recent post from Aaron Wall and quote:
“What Google frequently visits (and spends significant resources to keep updated) is what they consider important.”

I think your spot on about the whole google toolbar/buying links. How would they determine the value of a link?
I was just browsing the SEO blogs I read daily and thought you and your readers might be interested in this:

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/09/23/fundamental-principles-for-link-analysis/

Oh and Harvey, glad to see your SEO check tool is back in action, it frickin rocks!

Cheers

Michae - Oct 16, 2007

I don't think I'm that big on Page Rank when it comes to trading links. I'm more looking for how many indexed pages they have (site:www.~~~.com) and what type of traffic they recieve (alexa.com).

The PR is really something I only use to evaluate what Keywords are going to be hard to get when building a page for a specific Keyword.

Using my site for example. The title is Articles. This is one of the hardest Number one Ranks to achieve.. I definatly don't have it. PR7 or PR8 is number one and to get in the top ten I would need to be PR5, PR6 or so. Then evaluation of that makes me wonder if its better to make my site "Accouting Aricles" or "Adsense Articles" etc. This could really boost my rankings becuse the Page Rank would only be PR3 or PR4 and that I feel I could achieve.

Basicly I'm saying that PR is a useful tool, in my case, for evaluating what my SEO Keywords should be possible to achieve from a site like mine.

tauranga web desiners - Tauranga Web Designers - Nov 5, 2007

Hmmm... very interesting, how would google know what a paid link is and what isn't ive been to hundred of paid directories in my time, are they gonna snap me for it?

how is google to monitor this?

Lynny Bishop - Dec 28, 2007

No, can't get rid of pagerank, how would I ever know which website were worth trolling their backlinks, to see if I can find a place usually a forum that was worth joining cause I might get a backlink in a year or so, if there wasn't the the good old PR bar to tell me they had some backlinks from somewhere......

Actually as I wrote to you last week, I'm finding quite a change in google backlink engine, I've now come across 2 sites, that have a pagerank 1 of PR3 and 1 of PR4 that are entirely backlinks from the same site.

If a site was well indexed, and absolute links were used, there was almost always one backlink from the site to the site in the backlink engine, often the doamin name with or without the www, but lately I have noticed over and again that sites seem to be provoding their own pagerank.

Also what would I ever use IE for, if not to copy and paste some url from Maxthon to see what the pagerank was.

Paid advertising: I saw a forum the other day that was advertising $40 lifelong backlinks, they recon they have pain blog owned something like 120 grand for adding these adverts to their blog, so there must be a heap of people buying ad's huh.

Cheers Lynny

sanimoyo - Oct 1, 2008

removing the toolbar will not hinder link trading, we would still be able to check the number of incoming links to the site using google itself