Tag Archive for: Google PageRank

Raise a Glass, Google’s PageRank Toolbar is Finally Gone For Good

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Google Mac Search

Roughly a month after Google announced it would be completely shutting down the Google PageRank Toolbar, the service finally went dark over the weekend.

Now, those who have the PageRank toolbar installed will not be able to see the 1-to-10 rankings of sites they visit, making the toolbar officially useless. The move also cuts data from any third-party toolbar that tries to retrieve a PageRank score.

Of course, if you’ve been using the PageRank toolbar recently, you have been working from outdated data. Google hasn’t updated the public PageRank scores in years, so it makes sense to finally shut it down for good.

It must be noted that PageRank isn’t completely gone. It just isn’t available to the public anymore. Google will keep using the PageRank algorithm internally to help evaluate websites.

For more about the legacy of PageRank and the PageRank toolbar, I recommend reading Danny Sullivan’s RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web.

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Say Goodbye To Google PageRank

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Source: Robert Scoble / Flickr

Source: Robert Scoble / Flickr

Despite once being the gold standard for assessing a site’s authority and optimization, Google announced this week it will be shutting down PageRank and all toolbars featuring the tool will no longer show a PageRank score.

The algorithm-based tool would assess web pages and rank them on a scale of one to ten based on numerous signals that Google uses to evaluate pages. It was an easy-to-understand way to quickly “score” a website and know if optimization, link building, or other marketing efforts were having a positive effect. However, the tool has not been updated in years.

Many webmasters have been holding onto hope that PageRank would get an algorithm update, but the company has been slowly moving away from it for some time. PageRank scores were never displayed inside Google Chrome, and the scored were dropped from Google Search Console in 2009. The Google Open Directory website, which showed PageRank metrics, was also shut down in 2010.

The last bastion of the PageRank score was the IE Google toolbar, which continued to show scores up until now.

Google has confirmed it will not be updating the tool for the public, but it will continue to be used by Google internally.

The move signals a big shift away from Google’s old way of doing things, but in practical terms it will change very little. Since PageRank hadn’t been updated since 2013, SEOs and webmasters have learned to rely on other tools and methods of assessing their marketing efforts.

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