http://searchengineland.com/google-quietly-drops-pagerank-from-webmaster-tools-27821 A quote from the article GOOGLE: "it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.†They felt it was “silly†to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools." What's the next step. removing page rank from the toolbar? I hope so..
Another article on the subject http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/10/google-is-finally-killing-pagerank.html Nice quote from the article "This really leads you to conclude that role of PageRank has been reduced to nothing more than a comfort blanket for SEO noobs."
Another awesome find by Barre Tire. Yikes. PR is dying a slow death. Let's say they do go ahead one step further and remove it from the Toolbar (rendering the Toolbar meaningless except for Sidewiki). How are people now going to distinguish between strong established sites and lousy-ass useless sites? As maligned as it is, PR is (was?) a tremendously useful feature for evaluating a site at a glance (1-2 seconds). If it goes, we'll have to do some real digging - (60-120 seconds) to check the traffic stats, whois, Yahoo inlinks, etc etc etc.
Well my feeling is to check the serps for how well a site does. I do that anyway. Pick a few kw's from the site and do a search.. If they show up in the top 10 then I guess we know. There are other waysbut to me if they rank well in the serps then that means any link they give should definately help me..
Did you also see my other post on The Google Brand Update? This explains some of the tweaking going on lately. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1533895
I doubt google would remove PR anyway. Pagerank helps google rather than webmasters, it attracts a lot attention from webamsters. see how many people talk about PR. a good example is: when Microsoft introduced its Bing, Google updated its PR at the same time to try to blur Bing's influence...
PageRank is important only because webmasters love having an artificial number that can rank their website. If Google drops it altogether, it's just creating an opening for one of their competitors to create a new type of page ranking system to appeal to webmasters and fill in the gap.
Its part of there algo and doubt very much they get rid of it... (toolbar that is) All there doing is trying to hide it from webmasters so that they stop manipulating it and not give them a clue on what they will get next time. (you dont see it , you wont worry about it) laterz malcolm
About fricken time! I agree, the toolbar PR is already established as a decent 'tool' and brand for google to get rid of anytime soon, imho at least.
lots of webmasters still consider PR important.for example,if you want to exchange links,if you have low PR,it will be hard to do it,but if you have high PR it will be a lot more is easy ,as more webmasters will be interested
If PR goes away links will still be bought and sold and factors other than PR will dictate the price of the links including Domain Age, Backlinks, Unique Visitors, Page Views, etc. etc. PR is not important, there are other things that successful webmasters focus on.
Matt Cutts has stated so many times that people should not focus on PageRank that he must be blue in the face. However, as a consumer, I personally like PageRank. While I know it is not a ranking factor, it does provide a trust rating of sorts for me in that if a site has PR, I am more likely to consider the website legitimate in the eyes of Google. Remove the PR tab from the Toolbar and I will uninstall the Google Toolbar.
On the other side of that are you telling me a perfectly legitimate and well ranked website that has a low pr that ranks well that people should not trust them because of a little green bar? If that is the case I better stop shopping at some of the places I have shopped at online.
Case in point Survivor millions of people watching tonight PR4 http://samoa.survivor.com/ US Government US Goverments website PR10 http://www.usa.gov/ Do you trust the government?
And thank goodness for that. I'm tired of hearing about the value of PR2 v PR3 v PR4 in regards to actually authentic keyword links. Why you'd want a PR 4 link in a sh*t website versus an actual authentic link in a PR 3 that gets traffic and doesn't drive readers immediately to adsense is beyond me...but maybe it's beyond them, too. *wink*
OMG Don't shop at onlineshoes.com they are a PR 0 . Who cares that they have been selling shoes since 1996. Check out this press release Onlineshoes.com’s Angel Djambazov Named Affiliate Manager of the Year at Global E-Commerce Summit To me that is trust. Not a green bar that Google shows that can be manipulated. You cannot manipulate reputation. Okay my rant is done..