Google Confirms ToolBar PageRank Is No More

[engine]

Google has confirmed to Searchengineland that it has finally, and officially killed off toobar PageRank, so if you have a PageRank indicator in the browser, or in a tool, in the next couple of weeks it'll no longer work.

[searchengineland.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

It's about time!

(Better late than never.)

[tangor]

Stole my comment, EditorialGuy!

Not really news as toolbar page rank hasn't worked for ... what? ... a long time. :)

[Swanny007]

I thought it was gone LOL Good riddance.

[IanTurner]

It's sort of sad seeing the passing of one of the classic SEO indicators - I can remember the time when everyone was looking forward to updates so they could see if they had increased their page rank - it was fun at the time.

[keyplyr]

It is still an indicator of how long a page has been in the index. Yes the number itself hasn't been a factor in a long time, but if a page does have a number, I get a general idea that the page has been indexed and included by Google for quite a while and thus not newly created for questionable purposes so I still keep the extension on all my browsers.

[Dymero]

Keyplyr: The article says the data will be removed entirely. Also, even if it were staying, over the years this would begin to become an unreliable metric as new pages grow older and some old pages disappear.

[keyplyr]

@Dymero - yup and until then I continue to use it for validating backlink virtuosity.

[JS_Harris]

Seems like Trust flow and citation flow are becoming highly coveted by a lot of spam site and personal blog network owners. One step forward, two steps back.

[jpalmer]

Never paid any attention to it, even before Penguin.

Still, rather ironic, given Google's core patent and algo SERPs were based on links (if you believed the early Page/Brin media).

And at least we'll have no more of those stupid spam emails touting the benefits of P5 ranking pages! ;-)

[EditorialGuy]

Quite a few bloggers are worrying about their Moz DA these days, now that toolbar PR is a thing of the past. Different letters, same obsession. :-)

[piatkow]

Never paid any attention to it, even before Penguin.

Same here. Real, converting, visitors are the only metric of value.

[engine]

It has now gone:. End of an era.

[afsarsal]

now everything is going to change for SEO tools. I believe if Google doesn't show it it means they do not use it internally. Maybe they developed a more complicated rank number mechanism, I mean not just a number between 0-10.

[EditorialGuy]

I believe if Google doesn't show it it means they do not use it internally.

Why would you assume that? A better explanation is that Google simply wants to make it harder for people to buy and sell PageRank. "Toolbar PR" has served its purpose, and from Google's point of view, there's no longer any benefit in displaying it.

[Jez123]

there's no longer any benefit in displaying it.

Was there ever then?

[piatkow]

Maybe they developed a more complicated rank number mechanism, I mean not just a number between 0-10.

I suspect that it always was much more complex than that.

[EditorialGuy]

Was there ever then?

Back in the day, Google promoted the idea that Toolbar PageRank was an indicator of page quality (i.e., that it showed, in a rough way, whether a page had a lot of "votes" in the form of links). And, of course, when people installed the Google Toolbar, Google benefited from whatever data the toolbar gathered.

[jrs79]

I liked page rank, because it could help me identify how much Google valued a page on my site/sites. I learned a lot from that.