The PR tool bar is one of the greatest marketing tools of all time. The removal of the PRTB makes no difference to me either way.
IMHO, Google will never (nor are they suggesting) remove PR from their internal calculations. I believe that what Adam Lasnik is referring to is the removal of that exported value from the toolbar.
No it doesnt. Pagerank is one of the most important Marketing tools Google has. So many people chase after pagerank and it keeps GOOGLE in everyone's thoughts. If PageRank goes away, Google had better come up with something else to replace it. Otherwise, people will start chasing something else, such as Alexa Rank. And then many many many people will talk about Alexa and not Google.
Sure it will. You'll miss it. You wont trust Google Backlinks because they are never right. So what will you come to look at as a measure of someone's site? Yahoo Backlinks? Alexa Rank? You'll need something without your PR Fix.
PR isn't what sells links, it's web presence. TBPR is just one rough way to measure this, and it's often outdated and inaccurate. Without it we will simply move on to some other rough means of measuring a website's traffic-sending potential. That other method will also be inaccurate, and we will bitch and moan about it, but we'll be doing it without mentioning Google every other sentence. Therefore, Google are unlikely ever to get rid of the toolbar display, even if they start exporting it yearly. Personally, I don't give a damn whether they keep showing it or not.
I tend to agree with this ... Let me say that google doesnt offer me much usefulness on their toolbar other then the "search" and "PR box" to make an educated guess of whether a site is "quality" or "banned"... with out the bar then i have no choice but to take the "alexa rank" and a few other things like yahoos backlinks into consideration before making that educated guess. But in the end... Que Sera ... Sera thx malcolm
I think that google should make the page rank more useful if they keep it. I think a box that pops up when you hover over the page rank should tell you what terms the site is ranking for with that page rank. I mean, if a site has a PR9 for the term "About Us", who really cares? But if I have a site on baseball and they rank PR9 for "baseball", then that is really valuable to me. That will do basically what they are trying to do, get rid of the shady sites just duping people because they have a high page rank. This way people that really do have good content sites then they will get the benefit. At the very least it will cause people to try and get the high page rank for words that are meaningful. This would of course require people to actually come up with some good content. I also think that they need to make a voting system as well. Allowing end users to vote on a site. If they think it is a valuable site for the specific keywords that the site is ranking for, then people need to be able to vote on that. Of course fraud is the first thing that comes to mind, but there could be checks put in place to fight that pretty easily. If a site gets visited and voted on irregularly in a bad or good way, then someone from Google could check it out. Anyway, I am not trying to solve all of their problems, just throw out a few ideas on how to make it helpful to the end user as well as the site owners. Fred
The toolbar pagerank is for people surfing the web to see the quality score of a website. He just asks 'what else do you like to see?' And then you make up a nice story...