Unless you have been in another planet for the last 6 months, you know that google hasn't made it's traditionnal pagerank export yet (maybe never again). Though it has no impact on the accuracy of results in the SERP because google keeps updating the PR values for all websites quite frequently, there are a few people who are really annoyed by that PR not changing. Imagine that you have launched a promissing website on June 2007 and that you want to sell or exchange links on it (as it has gained popularity and traffic). Guess what, TLA, LinkWorth, webmasters... no one will pay any good money for a website with no PR. Thanks to google's lazyness (in fact I would call it smartness), even if your real PR has gone up to 3 or 4, you are still shown that ugly gray bar, the same one advertisers see and that takes them away from your website. I really think the fact that google hasn't exported the new PR values will hurt the link buying market unless someone finds a reliable way to get PRs. Is it done on purpose? I would tend to say YES. Yes, google is making a very subtle and smart move towards "killing" those paid links that are hurting the quality of the results returned by its algo. What are your thoughts?
Subtle? They are doing it in the interest of SERPs and normal search engine users. I don't think there's any reason for them to be subtle about it.
SEO competes with AdWords for the money of advertisers, and Google is interested in making text links more expensive. Showing PR 0 in the toolbar for pages that have real PR > 0 is not the way to increase link prices.
You mean google wants to make links more expensive so that adwords seems a better alternative? Sounds logical, but then: First, I see nothing done to make that happen. Second, if links cause results to be less relevant Google will loose market share and Adwords won't be an alternative since there will be less traffic to buy from google Third, fewer high PR sites (many PR0) leads to higher prices !!!??? And yes you are right, google doesn't need to be subtle, I meant the strategy is smart.
i dont think google would do that..it serves no benefit to them...and dont they update pagerank every few weeks when they crawl the web??
The general consensus now is that PR is constantly in flux, and that Google is constantly re-indexing many websites. They no longer do crawls on set intervals - its an ongoing process now. The same goes for backlinks, SERPs, etc. Google is slowly moving towards having SERPs and rankings changing in near real time. Probably bi-hourly is the best they can ever get, but compared to monthly or quarterly updates, every 2-3 hours is almost instant.
True, from my own experience that's a real trend forced by blogs being far more time sensitive than websites...
I think your theory sounds. If this is true, then the next move is to remove the PR toolbar. If the PR toolbar is still shown, link price for high PR site will go sky high and serve no purpose for Google in battling link sales. IMHO, this PR update delay is just a new trend, maybe it'll now take 6 months pe update. But who knows
I don't think PR is going anywhere and if it does people will eventually stop depending on it. Then someone will come up with another tool to figure out what a pages rank/value is.