martinibuster - 3:58 pm on Aug 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

But when that "non-event" is also buggy (because Google sees it as unimportant?), then some advertisers will not pay fair value to a website for hosting their ads.

I don't know if that's a good reason to dump the green bar. Advertising shouldn't be tied to the green bar. Advertising should be concerned with pageviews and unique visitors. Link buys are marginally concerned with the green bar, but even there I would suggest that the green bar is a red herring for determining a quality link and I cannot see it being useful as a quality metric.

Branding. Image. Mindshare.

Google has been upfront about that. Their engineers constantly tell us the toolbar is not for webmasters to make business decisions off of or for ranking better, or for unraveling what the secret sauce is. The fault belongs squarely with webmasters for being lazy by doing what everybody else is doing and ignorant for not researching it for themselves and seeing the answer coming straight from Google engineers. Yeah they're going to backpedal enough to keep you using it, but we all know it's not useful for SEO purposes.

You know it's not good for you, so why do you still use it?
I mean, come on, it's 2007 and webmasters are still insisting to their link monkeys to discount anything under PageRank 4. Anyone still hung up by PR 4 couldn't be more lost and confused short of...

People in the know don't use GTBPR as a metric. Everyone else can keep on using it as far as I care because it gives me the competitive advantage. If Google should stop displaying the toolbar it would be one less tool for Google to keep webmasters off balance, plus a dip in mindshare through toolbar use. It's webmasters using the toolbar and influencing others to use it, right?

In my opinion it's not about Google displaying the green bar, or even keeping it up to date. It's about webmasters not understanding what a proper metric is.