Been? I aint done, I could give a shit about PR, I got traffic and what ever is going on at google don't matter. I like google, but it's my job to market my site, not google's.
I thought that was in New Orleans. Doesn't matter, I really doubt they would let me in if they realized who I was. Either because they know I have tough questions, or they consider me nuts. Musta been Fred that tripped over the plug, spilled his soda in the router, and created widespread panic across the web. I take it you haven't read the entire thread yet.
I disagree. PR is still very valuable, and it's still taken into consideration for rankings. The Toolbar PageRank that everyone is talking about in this thread, yeah, that's a waste of time and doesn't serve any purpose (maybe a VERY ROUGH indicator at best). I gaurantee you Google isn't "dropping" PR. Perhaps they're shutting down the toolbar, and I think that's fine, but they would have rewrite their entire search engine just to take out an algorithm. Even if the toolbar disappears, we're still going to need inbound links. We're still going to need to submit to directories, do link exchanges, etc.. We might just have a different indicator to look at -- ie. traffic, number of pages indexed, number of backlinks, etc.. Everyone had a massive panic back in July of last year when a PR update didn't happen. Well folks, one happened a few months later. Nothing changed in terms of the SERPs (the stuff that matters), but hey, we all talked about it anyway. Last time the PR update didn't happen, everyone thought of a new way to do link exchanges. Be innovative again, and stop speculating all of this useless crap that obviously none of us could even possibly confirm.
Does anyone see this affecting their keyword ranking? Is it possible they just stopped letting us see PR on sites and are keeping it internal? Very odd, I can't wait to see what comes of this. I'm surprised (well not really) that google doesn't have some sort of bizarre anouncement? (probably totally unrelated, but I had pages added to the google index, but my weight dropped 1000 points in the ad network. I don't get it, unless the ad network is seeing different results than me.)
What's the big deal? Can't you guys sell without it? What is the big deal here? Am I repeating myself?
noppid, I hear ya. =) I'm not worried about it, i just find it odd, and am a curious person, like to know what's going on and such. =)
If you look at your stats, get traffic or rather traffic increases, then what do you guys need PR for. PR is Google's way of tricking confused seo's who don't have the mindset to see the bigger picture. Google hates quick fixers who think they have things figgured out. The fact that we have 20 people here looking at a thread because it is titles something with PR, is very very sad.
PR will have to be replaced with something similar. It is one of the biggest marketing tools Google has. But PR is over as we know it.
There are so many different reasons why web sites rank in Google. To focus too much on one thing is not a good idea.
If you think PR has a small to no effect on serps, consider this: I got one link to an internal page on my site from a very strong PR7 page in DMOZ (the dmoz page has only 41 total links on it [10 outbounds]). That one link put the internal page as the lead result at #11 with my homepage as the indented result below it at #12. Within my site there was only 1 link to the internal page, it wasn't even from the homepage. It's a 17.5 million result one word search BTW. So compared to all the other work I had put in promoting my homepage from all ends of the relevant and non relevant cyber earth I could access, this one PR charged link from dmoz trumped those efforts. The page in dmoz isn't the category that appears in the serps, it's barely related. Only 1 occurence of the keyword appears on the dmoz page, as one of two words in the anchor text link to my page. So really, this isn't a very relevant page at all to be linking to my page. If you think PR doesn't have much effect, explain that one.
I'm not saying PR doesn't mean anything, just saying if you focus on it, you will lose track of what is really going on. There is a good thread in Joey's forum about it.
I am not seeing PageRank on any websites this evening. When I mouseover the PageRank image, it says "No PageRank Information Avialable".
PR is screwed up right now. People are thinking it's going to be done away with and replaced by Trustrank, which was recently submitted as a patent by Google. One way or another, no one is really sure as to what is going on right now.
Google is not returning page ranking information at all. Not rank nor the full xml record. Noone seems to know if they turned it all off or whether they just changed the checksum algorighm yet again.