For the past 24 hours there appears to be no pr showing for any site.

IMO this is likely to be related to the current updates going on but there are those who think this may signal an end to toolbar PR.

Share your observations and opinions on what this means.

I began wondering whether the PR bar was going to be removed when I saw the "Download The Google Toolbar" ad on Google and noticed that the diagram had no PR feature. I seem to remember the diagram having a PR bar a few months ago...

http://toolbar.google.com

I certainly don't want to fuel unsubstantiated rumors, but if in fact PR is being eliminated from the toolbar, is there another way to view PR (or a measure of it, since I know toolbar PR is not actual PR)?[/url]

Nothing that Google does would really suprise me. They have created a circus with the Page Rank thing. Whole businesses have been created and flourish largely because of it. I look to my right here and see 3 out of 6 ads about it. 2 of them flashing messages about it. Perhaps Google feels that it has gotten out of control. On the other hand, a circus draws a lot of attention. I think it was Mae West who said. "I don't care what they say about me as long as they say something". It could be that Page Rank is just another cog in the wheel of Google's prosperity and Mel is right. In that case the Page Rank bar will soon show it's cheery green color again. In either case I don't believe that the importance of how many IBs a site has will diminish. It IS nice have such a handy and fun scorecard though.

IMO this is just a temporary thing ... PageRank is such an integral part of Google's Technology and the ability to see the PR of website is one of their selling points on why Google is the best search engine.

Further to this, version 3 of the toolbar isn't that old, so if they were going to get rid of it, they would have removed it from this version.

Yes, that makes sense Timbo. I also think they would have removed all the references to the PageRank indicator on the toolbar information page if they were really going to remove it.

Well I thought it was just my computer acting up. I'm glad it is not just me seeing the grey toolbar. It makes you wonder what they are up to.


-Cindy

1. its not only toolbar glitch, pagerank is off (also on pr checkers)
2. maybe its connected with TrustRank?

somebody noticed that new toolbars are withour page rank?

I do not think we`re gonna see more of the PageRank. The reason is that to many people make money on selling high PR. Just have a look at Ebay and other places. PR5 sells for $55 ++/month

Google will change the algo - better for all of us!


Stig

Google might be trying to make the web a better place. They probably couldn't figure out how to measure site relevance and thought that removing visible PR would force us to start getting links based on relevancy as opposed to PR.

A month ago I raised the thought that PR will be off soon:
http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewtopic.php?t=5340
Maybe now is the time?
Yaron

More than likely, they are merely changing how the toolbar gets the info, as they did last May. The old method of pulling the data is still functioning, but only once in a while, prolly 1:50 pulls.

As I said in the opening post I think this is related to updates at Google,and is IMO not likely to be the demise of PageRank.

There are several indications that Google are into PR for the long run, among them

The long term lease Google has on PR from Stanford is not cheap.
Google use PR in some way in their module which decides the order in which sites are spidered
Google use PR in thier internal data operations for the ordering of some of thier files.

I can see them doing something similar to what they have done with the link: search perhaps further obfuscating the information the display provides.

If google is not changing the algo. Bud just the toolbar than there is no change in doing business. Only for PR sellers who got more and more money for selling links. Now we must look at a site at it's merrit and do exchanges on the basics of the site. the amounth of backlinks a site has and where the site ranks in the backlinks in Yahoo who is almost showing al backlinks. The one's with the high PR where always on top. so the SEO job just got better for the professionals and whorse for the links sellers.

Actually jus the opposite. Now there is no easy way for the "professionals" to see who to trade links with and makes them have to look harder at sites. Link sellers will continue as normal, only now they can charge higher prices for sites that were not really worth as much.

The best version of what is going on:
- Google just stopped showing PageRank. Its not like PR is off. But why? There are several important reasons for it. For example:
- coop systems
- link brokerage

In our times we can get a lot of many in easy way if we have high page rank page. I think Google is against it.

Browse the internet without PR is like reading without my glasses
I used to evaluate website quality (mostly content ones) by their PR. It is really missing.
Yaron

Hmmm
I'm always looking on content.. Content is the most important. PR is just a number thats all...

PR help me evaluate in one look. I read slow...

outgoing link strength is always passed on by incoming link stregnth to the linking site. Regardless of PR, content doesnt have much to d with link popularity, so that has no bearing on either co-ops or brokerages in the least. No more perceived PR may harm a couple of the smallest link brokerages, but it wont even slow the real ones down a tad.

That slices both ways. As a buyer I would not be as willing to pay top dollar for a site without a lot of proof that they had good rankings. I bet the market is going to switch to more of a volume per link price since it will now be relatively impossible to track the value of a link.

so has PR definitely been scrapped then?

c_t I highly doubt it. We are just discussing trends if it had been is all.

Yes but high PR is no guarantee that you have high rankings, nor does is make anchor text links any better, just more expensive due to IMO a general misconception of what PR means.

Here's my opinion, for what it's worth. Google haven't abandoned PR (or even the display of PR). Because,

1. They are still showing it as a feature of their toolbar, with equal prominence amonst the other features. See http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/b ... tures.html

They are actively encouraging people to download and install the toolbar and make use of that feature.

2. They are a public company. If their website says "Use the Toolbar’s PageRank™ display to tell you how Google’s algorithms assess the importance of the page you're viewing." - then they would change that statement at the time of, or before removing the feature. This means for the time being (once this technical glitch is fixed), their toolbar will "tell you how Google’s algorithms assess ..."

What I think they should (and may) change is :

1. Backlinks should ONLY be used to initially discover a website (for spidering). Ignore the anchor text and number of links, as these can easily be manipulated.

2. Focus on page content - and as such, ignore (or significantly devalue) any pages with more than one or two external links. Google shouldn't be in the business of sending visitors to other 'search listings', which really are just a page with affiliate links or adverts to the real content.

Remember, it's only my opinion ...

But the suggestion that you made would seem to me to be that they do not use PR or anchor text as a ranking factor, and if that is so why display it?

The problem with that scenario is that in cases where there are ten milllion pages competing how do you differentiate between essentially millions of pages with the same content? Is your site more relevant to a search term simply because you use the word one more time than another site, or higher on the page?

This is the reason why search engines have to use external factors to assess which pages are more relevant for the search term, and thus they use external links as a "vote" for the relevancy of the page.

Question for you. How are they supposed to algorhithmically do this? When there are tons of websites with no ads, and a ton of outgoing links that are merely there to send people to information which they are looking for? Until their indexing system can read and understand content as well as a human, this is an impossible task.

And remember, on-site content is actually easier to manipulate than external links anchor text....

Lotsa holes...

For what its worth here’s my guess.

Google staff are on holiday and someone caused the system to shut down after making millions of automated queries and everything will be back to normal when the google techs are back in the office.

You know what... I think so too !

I'm with Will on this. On-site optimisation is much easier to manipulate, getting natual linking structure from multiple different websites, which can be a full time job.

Untill google can come up with a better way judge of a webpages quality, links are still going to be the main factor. I believe that Page Rank and inbound links will continue to be the main element behind the ranking of webpages. All google can do is add extra filters to penalise against unnatural linking and make it as hard as possible for us to figure out how much effect the links will have,and the best way to do that, get rid of the PageRank indicator.

I think this is the end of the little green bar, however the algorithm will stay fundementally the same.