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No More Public Access To Google PageRank Scores

Posted by timothy on 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.

9 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Heh... by EmeraldBot · · 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 whipslash · · Score: 3, Informative

      Updated the summary. They removed PageRank scores from any toolbar that incorporates them: Firefox, IE, Chrome, SEOBook, etc.

    2. Re:Heh... by Opportunist · · 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.
    3. Re:Heh... by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  2. Re:What SEO spam? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · 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
  3. Re:What SEO spam? by Scorch_Mechanic · · 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 · · 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:SEO experts? by stealth_finger · · Score: 5, Funny

    SEOs hate this one weird trick.

    --
    Wanna buy a shirt?
    https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
  6. As long as PageRank exists so will SEO spam by erice · · 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.