Are Google OK with using their PageRank?

[BannaNanna]

I've installed a third party script that gives the Google pagerank of any page on my site, but it doesn't use a Google API key to get it. Is this sort of thing going to annoy google? I have Adsense running as well, so I dont want the two to conflict.

[tedster]

Here's something relevant from Mozilla's "Googlebar" project:

In our private correspondences "behind the scenes", the main reason that Google staff have cited for taking down private pagerank scripts is that they often open the system to potential wide-scale abuse, especially by people looking to enhance a set of websites' rankings artificially and by making hundreds of requests for site ranks in a short time...

...we have to date always chosen not to include any code that would include Pagerank display, because of the legal issues with Google that this would potentially bring.

[googlebar.mozdev.org...]

[BannaNanna]

Thanks for that Tedster. I think I might write to them and see what their position is.

[tedster]

It would be good to get Google's position. Certainly there is a lot of unofficial page rank checking going on. However, the common use of a PR checker script requires an additional dedicated action by one single user at a time. Serving your PR number automatically to every page view is different from that, and it might be problematic, given the volume of queries it could potentially generate.

I know of one Firefox extension that backed off from automatically showing the PR of every url on the SERP and now requires you to click explicitly on a single url if you want to see its PR.

[BannaNanna]

I've seen quite a few sites offering PR checking as well as running AdSense, an example:

< sorry, no example urls. See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com] >

His own PR for that page is high as well!

[edited by: tedster at 4:24 pm (utc) on Aug. 2, 2007]

[Lord Majestic]

All those services actually rely on Google to get PR - they query their servers, which understandably is not something Google can be very happy about even if you ignore everything else.

What I wonder about is what would be Google's position if someone actually calculated PageRank exactly like they do (building and walking link-graph from crawled pages) in a country where Google's PageRank patent is not valid and can't be valid in principle (say in Europe you can't patent computer algorithms). Now that would be completely different ball game :)