Toolbar greyed for all sites?

Google's toolbar not showing PR anymore?

[cigjonser]

Does anyone else see the toolbar greyed out for all sites? I'm not getting anything.

[spaceylacie]

Ah, the toolbar and the power of suggestion. Maybe they are just trying to see what people really want. It's all about the click, baby.

I have no idea, but it is very odd. I'm not going to jump to any conclusions just yet. We'll see what happens after the holiday weekend.

[FillDeCube]

Yes, I believe google PR is gone forever.

Reasons :-

i) It will not goes down for 2 days. If it is a tech problem, it should have been fixed.

ii) New google directory (alpha) is already hiding PR bar. e.g. [directory.google.com...]

iii) [toolbar.google.com...] has replaced an image without PR bar.

[Trax]

it's gone
so is their toolbar on all my machines. :)

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

In short, it is not Google responsibility to inform wrong doers so they can prepare themselves.

Google do not (did not?) provide the PR tool for "wrongdoers". They provide it as a service to their users and they advertise it as such on their website. It is supposed to be a way of gauging the quality of websites.

Google still says, "Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar’s PageRank™ display to tell you how Google’s algorithms assess the importance of the page you're viewing."

If they have pulled the plug on PR they would do well to remember that PR can have another meaning, i.e. Public Relations. If this is just a glitch or an update they could help their own PR by providing their users with a status report on their home page to let them know that their search engine is not currently doing what they claim that it can.

All this would take would be a one liner, "Our PR tool is being updated and not available at present", or something along these lines. No one would fall out with them for that. If it is being removed then they should have announced this before the event.

[mack]

I think the long and short is no one, bar webmasters really care. No general user will install the bar simply for PR viewing purposes. They install it for search, and there is nothing to stop them doing that.

Mack.

[Snappy_fish]

Just a thought,

If they "hide" PR in the toolbar, real PR could become really important again and no one would notice.

[davelms]

ii) New google directory (alpha) is already hiding PR bar. e.g. [directory.google.com...]

Isn't that just the alphabetical order? :-) The link to order in PageRank order is still on that example page, and shows the PR bar, with a toggle for the display order to go between PR or Alphabetical ordering. I had merely assumed "alpha" meant the ordering, given it appears as the URL when you request alphabetical order, and not a new version. Did I miss a trick here?

[nomatter]

iii) [toolbar.google.com...] has replaced an image without PR bar.

This indicates googles's strategy shift!

[kservik]

It is still in the second page.

[Vork]

Hey guys just imagine what's gonna happen to those big PR sellers, selling links to those "unupgraded" individuals who still think google pagerank still has the value it had once long ago before all that turmoil of Florida, Austin, sandbox, Bourbon and what not. Their business is basically busted and I believe that was Google's plan.

Busting the links selling this way preventing the most "unnatural" way of acquiring link popularity is something Google has been trying to do since it went IPO.

Myself I won't change anything in linking strategy for my projects - presence in cache, relevance, "hilltopness" in my area, age or "unsandboxedness" of the link partner's domain is what mattered to me for quite a while a lot more that just some green light on the bar.