No More Public Access To Google PageRank Scores

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No More Public Access To Google PageRank Scores

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 9, 2016 @05:32PM from the mixed-feelings-about-bad-rubbish dept.

campuscodi writes: Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that it is removing PageRank scores from the Google toolbar, which was the last place where someone could check their site's PageRank status. Many SEO experts are extremely happy at this point, since it seems that PageRank is responsible for all the SEO spam we see today.

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SEO experts? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-09 17:37 · Score: 0

Aren't they the ones doing all the SEO spamming?
1. Re:SEO experts? by davester666 · 2016-03-09 18:19 · Score: 1
  
  Oh no, they would never do that. They work tirelessly to make sure that their client's pages show up as high as possible when you search using appropriate terms. Anything else is purely incidental.
  
  --
  Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
2. Re:SEO experts? by stealth_finger · 2016-03-09 21:38 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  SEOs hate this one weird trick.
  
  --
  Wanna buy a shirt?
  https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
3. Re: SEO experts? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-09 21:45 · Score: 0
  
  The magical spam that always gets past Google's spam filters.
Sure it is. by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-09 17:38 · Score: 0

And not all you snake oil SEO people sending the spam.
Heh... by EmeraldBot · 2016-03-09 17:38 · Score: 2

IE Google toolbar

responsible for all the SEO spam we see today
My elderly grandmother lives a secret double life as an SEO expert? Damn, her disguise is truly unbreakable...

--
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
1. Re:Heh... by EmeraldBot · 2016-03-09 17:40 · Score: 1
  
  IE Google toolbar
  
  responsible for all the SEO spam we see today
  My elderly grandmother lives a secret double life as an SEO expert? Damn, her disguise is truly unbreakable...
  On a more serious note, I don't work with SEO and search engine rankings at the moment, but did this toolbar really have a large impact on the field? I've never heard of people using IE's Google toolbar for anything more than a prank on a family member...
  
  --
  "Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
2. Re:Heh... by whipslash · 2016-03-09 18:24 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Updated the summary. They removed PageRank scores from any toolbar that incorporates them: Firefox, IE, Chrome, SEOBook, etc.
3. Re:Heh... by Opportunist · 2016-03-09 18:58 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I do not know your grandmother dear, but I dare say that she knows at least as much about SEO as most self proclaimed SEO experts.
  
  --
  We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
4. Re:Heh... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-09 21:38 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  "did this toolbar really have a large impact on the field?"
  No, evidently. SEO is in my opinion a very dysfunctional area of business, which is basically built on making clients vague and unverifiable promises about their sites doing better in search results and hence more users seeing their pages. Most of the common SEO practices are actually things that the search engines actively penalise, and SEO companies get away with that partially because their clients are MBA idiots who'll believe anything and partially because it's very hard to judge whether a site change made your site go up and down in the rankings. There's considerable lag between site changes and ranking, penalties usually stay in place for a while after removing the offence, presumably to avoid people gaming the system, page rank is not the only factor in how well your site does in any given query, and direct verification is too laborious to be practical for most companies.
5. Re:Heh... by Tukz · 2016-03-10 00:08 · Score: 1
  
  I bet she's charges less though.
  Repetitively we get clients that pay thousands each month to a SEO companies that apparently does nothing.
  When we ask for documentation for their work, they are very elusive and never able to produce anything.
  They say they do all this work, but I can see from the log files and login history, they in fact do nothing at all on the website itself.
  Sure, they do some linkbuilding and stuff, but that's not worth thousands each month!
  SEO Experts is a scam, pure and simple.
  
  --
  - Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
6. Re: Heh... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 01:38 · Score: 0
  
  Can you clean house and replace Timothy already. He's an awful editor
7. Re: Heh... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 02:45 · Score: 0
  
  Timothy is a shared account used by the new editor interns to post stories, Or did you really think Timmy was up 24 7 posting stories for your enjoyment.
8. Re: Heh... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 03:46 · Score: 0
  
  It is his full time job. Not like it takes that much effort to put out the quality he does... Not sure why whiplash hasn't removed him yet.
What SEO spam? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-09 17:51 · Score: 0

Are you referring to expertsexchange? or what? I really don't see much SEO spam these days. Any time I do get a bad result, I just add -site:nameofsitewithbadresults.com to my search query, and it solves the problem.
1. Re:What SEO spam? by 93+Escort+Wagon · 2016-03-09 18:04 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Are you referring to expertsexchange?
  Well, if someone were seriously considering a sex change, I would hope they'd look for the best doctor available. It doesn't seem like something you should trust to some bargain basement discount physician you found on Craigslist.
  
  --
  #DeleteChrome
2. Re:What SEO spam? by Opportunist · 2016-03-09 19:00 · Score: 1
  
  When you get a bad result? I have a default string collection of "-site:..." I pretty much have to tack on any search.
  Wonder if there's a plugin that does it for you.
  
  --
  We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
3. Re:What SEO spam? by Scorch_Mechanic · 2016-03-09 20:35 · Score: 2
  
  I recall that Google used to have an option for this sort of thing (it was an option next to the cached page link that would remove that website from the current and future searches) but it wasn't around for very long and my google fu isn't strong enough to find any useful mentions of it.
  If you do happen to find a plugin (perhaps a custom search engine for firefox?) that does this, I would be interested to hear about it.
  
  --
  You should turn signatures off.
4. Re:What SEO spam? by phantomfive · 2016-03-09 20:49 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  If you own a blog, or any other place where users can put comments, then it will get tons of comment spam, from bots trying to improve page-rank. It makes it difficult to run a comment section of a website (the other difficult problem being people).
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
5. Re: What SEO spam? by CodeReign · 2016-03-09 21:02 · Score: 1
  
  Google block list... By Google.
  Available for chrome.
6. Re: What SEO spam? by colton.english · 2016-03-09 21:03 · Score: 1
  
  Er. Personal block list.
7. Re:What SEO spam? by stealth_finger · 2016-03-09 21:42 · Score: 1
  
  Are you referring to expertsexchange?
  Well, if someone were seriously considering a sex change, I would hope they'd look for the best doctor available. It doesn't seem like something you should trust to some bargain basement discount physician you found on Craigslist.
  I dunno, I've got some pretty good reviews on yelp. Come in for some new junk and I'll do your kidneys for free. Now if you'll excuse me I have a client coming and need to fill a seedy motel bath tub full of ice.
  
  --
  Wanna buy a shirt?
  https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
8. Re: What SEO spam? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-09 21:43 · Score: 0
  
  Crap substitution for the original feature. Just hides results. If all results are blocked you get no results on the page.
9. Re:What SEO spam? by Big+Hairy+Ian · 2016-03-10 00:49 · Score: 1
  
  Thankfully there are reliable techniques for increasing your Search Engine Optimization but it would be impressive to see some one try to do it with a vacuum pump :)
  
  --
  Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
10. Re:What SEO spam? by Jason+Levine · 2016-03-10 01:32 · Score: 1
  
  I added a captcha field to my blog's comments section and that really cut down on the spam. I didn't opt for a "letters written so weirdly that even humans can't read it" captcha, but for a math based one. For example, my comment form might say: One + [ ] = 5. If you type in "4", your comment gets through. If you type in anything else, your comment gets nuked. The math problems are simple enough for even the most math-challenged commenter but wind up being tricky for comment spam bots. (Some spammers hand copy/paste their spam so this gets through, but Akismet and other tools can help catch these.)
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
11. Re:What SEO spam? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 01:34 · Score: 0
  
  Wouldn't those be funny shaped hanging between my legs? And get bumped a lot if I ever got out of my chair, when mom is asleep and I have to fetch my own Doritos?
  Admittedly, you'd reduce latency by eliminating the buffer between the kidneys and the output port.
12. Re:What SEO spam? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 01:37 · Score: 0
  
  Rule 34. And yes, porn words in your page's tags does increase your ranking. It's also common to put them in transparent overlays, so the porn text is visible to search engines but not to a casual glance with a web browser.
13. Re: What SEO spam? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 02:58 · Score: 0
  
  Also, I used to run a wiki and I probably didn't take anti-measures, as seriously as I should have. I woke up one morning to thousands of pages worth of spam entries.
14. Re:What SEO spam? by garcia · 2016-03-10 03:36 · Score: 1
  
  Did you really have that much problem? 99% of the issue went away for me (on a blog that was averaging around 1 million pageviews a month and ~1000 real comments a month) when using Akismet. The rest went away after banning common /16s and /24s which were problematic.
15. Re: What SEO spam? by spiritplumber · 2016-03-10 04:19 · Score: 1
  
  Same here. I added a header that says, with a bit of ascii/unicode steganography, "the password to edit all the pages is DERP" and it went mostly away.... for now :)
  
  --
  Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
16. Re:What SEO spam? by um...+Lucas · 2016-03-10 04:29 · Score: 1
  
  Thing is, computers happen to be REALLY GOOD AT MATH! I can't imagine that it would take much effort at all for bots to start solving those.
  Compared to image-based captchas, where one has to enter text from a horrible photograph or just select an image matching specific criteria ("pick the image below that has a cake in it"), I'm surprised that the math captchas have lasted for as long as they have...
17. Re:What SEO spam? by Jason+Levine · 2016-03-10 04:39 · Score: 1
  
  It's not just the math. It's a mix up of which place the requested number is, whether the number is spelled out ("ten") or written using digits ("10"), and what operation is being requested. For example, my captcha could be any of the following:
  5 - two = [ ]
  [ ] + 1 = 7
  12 + [ ] = nineteen
  Combining all of these makes it harder for computers to solve the captcha while keeping it easy for humans. I was getting 80+ spam comments daily until I implemented the captcha. Then it dropped to one or two a day. No, it's not unsolvable by computers. Captchas and computers solving them will always be an arms race so at some point this captcha method will fail. For now, though, it puts up enough of a roadblock to stop the spam bots while not irritating human readers to much that they don't comment because of the captcha.
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
18. Re:What SEO spam? by PCM2 · 2016-03-10 08:38 · Score: 1
  
  The truth is, spammers will eventually get around any form of captcha, if it's important enough to them. As long as a human can decipher your captcha, there's always Mechanical Turk.
  
  --
  Breakfast served all day!
19. Re:What SEO spam? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 10:26 · Score: 0
  
  Home-grown captcha on a single site? Very few SEOs / bot-writers will bother.
  Same algorithm on a few hundred sites? Now it's worth the time to crack it.
20. Re:What SEO spam? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 23:29 · Score: 0
  
  This sort of thing works not because computers can't figure out that "One" is the same as "1" and do the math, but rather, it works because you're being spammed by bots written to target your forum software, and by changing it in some minor way, you've rendered it incompatible with the bots that are attempting to post the spam.
  In one such forum my special question was "type 'spam' into this box." Indeed, if you failed to do so, it specifically told you to go back and type "spam" into that box. So even if you couldn't read English you could probably figure out what it was wanting you to do. Whereas I was getting a new fake account and some spam every few days before I made that change, afterwards the problem entirely disappeared for several years. Then suddenly it started getting more fake accounts every few days. I'm not sure why it stopped working, but my guess it that someone has a bot which flags copies of the forum with extra sign-up questions and then a human answers the extra question so that the bot knows how to proceed on future visits to that site. In any event, I changed the question to "what is the opposite of black" and, if you fail to answer correctly, it even tells you to type "white" into the box, and I haven't seen any more spam since. So you don't even have to make people solve math or any sort of puzzle at all, you just have to have software that is slightly different from the software that the spam bots target.
  I also have another forum that is unique in that it's a script I wrote about ten years ago which no one else has. It has a moderation system built in to prevent spam, but I turned it off years ago since there never was any spam. Since the software runs only on my web site, no one has written a bot to spam it, so it just doesn't happen except for a one-time event every few years when someone pops in and manually posts some link spam.
Often Got Link Spam by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-09 20:34 · Score: 0

My somewhat popular website has made me the target for many emails purportedly helping me by pointing out some broken links, but actually asking to be added as a link. They sometimes embed their link in a list of other links, hoping that I wouldn't notice the odd man.
Won't matter to my SEO... by ZiakII · 2016-03-10 02:34 · Score: 1

My SEO has the ask.com toolbar installed and has her default search provider as Yahoo.com..
PigeonRank by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 03:05 · Score: 0

It's OK because real SEO experts know that Google have been using PigeonRank all along.
OK maybe not, but I would not be slightly surprised that Google is manually "crowd" ranking, for at least the first few pages of the top search requests in every region.
Prove yourself: condom
swillden? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 05:43 · Score: 0

Interesting development. I'd love to hear swillden's objective opinion on this change.
As long as PageRank exists so will SEO spam by erice · 2016-03-10 06:18 · Score: 2

Google is still using PageRank, they just aren't showing the numbers to the public. This makes objectively measuring the effectiveness of SEO spam difficult. However, the effect on search is unchanged so I don't see the spamming going away any time soon. Email spam has never had useful measurements of its effectiveness and what there is mostly says it doesn't work. Yet it persists.
1. Re:As long as PageRank exists so will SEO spam by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-10 07:34 · Score: 0
  
  At the very least, maybe a bunch of "SEO Experts" will get lots of chargebacks and/or go out of business when their promises to make their clients PageRank 8 can no longer be proven.
2. Re:As long as PageRank exists so will SEO spam by CurtisAJ · 2016-03-23 13:52 · Score: 1
  
  This is good to know. I am currently taking a digital marketing class and we are learning about Pagerank and how to grow your ranking organically. It seems this will make it much harder for SEO "experts" to do their jobs. Digital marketing is a fast growing field so school may have to rethink how they are teaching SEO. I started a blog to talk about the best digital marketing classes. Check it out if you have a minute. https://bestdigitalmarketingcl...