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No More Public Access To Google PageRank Scores
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.
"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.