But not in the way you might think.. At this point Toolbar PR smells like old technology that fuels link selling and gaming the system. The vast majority of people who care are webmasters, I doubt the average user even knows what it is. So how does Pagerank help Google? Well first you have to define help. I can't see Toolbar PR providing any ongoing benefit to Google's core business model ( Search / Advertising). My guess would be negative reinforcement, if current trends are anything to go by. If Google can make good use of Pagerank, it may be as a tool for discouraging sites that even smell of link sales and farming. Negative effects on the Google idea of a good webmaster (making quality content and linking to quality content) would be minimal. Since I suck at marketing and don't buy or sell links Pagerank doesn't really mean a lot to me. Or should I say shouldn't mean a lot - I still spend way to much time wondering about my sites' PR. What do you think? Should Pagerank keep going as usual, be used as a naughty stick, or just dropped?
Gamma, I appreciate your concern about PR. If you look at it, besides webmaster honestly no one even look at that green bar. Google strongly feels the green bar is used as a tool to buy/sell links. So if the green bar goes, people will have some difficulty in selling links. Please note, that google has never said dont do advertising on other sites. You can continue to advertise on other blogs however it should be within their TOS. Now how would u advertise but still being good in eyes of google? Well just add rel="nofollow" to your ad link. That means you are advertising purely for generating traffic or sales and your intention is not for passing PR. Hope that helps understand why google is doing this and whats their motive.
Glad. you guys like my theory well its a fact. People love to accuse google for all the latest paid link changes but no one seriously understand the real motive behind it.
Thanks sparks. You are welcome. I hope more people understand how to tackle the paid advertising penalty and continue to buy/sell advertising in legitimate way. Text-link-Ads and some other companies got spanked for the only reason that they were selling PR and not advertising. If they were a pure ad company, they wouldnt get this ban. Google is not against advertising, they are against people trying to sell Pagerank and manipulate google rankings.
I sell a million links a day, and pagerank doesn't mean anything to me. If Google decides to abandon toolbar pagerank, it wouldn't be a major problem, because we can count PR ourselves.