Why Did Google Retire the PageRank Toolbar?
RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web
Google released the first version of its Google PageRank Toolbar for Internet Explorer, and it was a huge success. When our course Infor 2040 first discuss page rank, I was so excited. I do not have a future career plan in Silicon Valley, but getting to know some basic logic behind these currently most popular companies is always a really good experience. I have heard that the Page rank algorithm is the most successful and ground-breaking product for google for a long time. After getting to know more about the beauty of the page rank algorithm, however, I surprisingly found that google actually retire the page rank toolbar a few years ago.
SEOs developed an obsession with PageRank, which quickly overtook the creation of quality content and a positive user experience as the SEO approach that received the most attention. The issue was that by making a PageRank Score available to the public, SEOs might more easily manipulate it along with other affecting elements like anchor text, nofollow, and the reasonable surfer model. SEOs took advantage of the fact that they were aware of how to use PageRank to raise the ranking of their websites. From Google’s point of view, the issue was the PageRank toolbar that was visible to the general public. Without it, there was no reliable way to assess the authority of a web page (at least officially). In the end, PageRank was misused by SEOs who used it to influence ranks, leaving Google with little choice but to discontinue the toolbar.
However, I think that it is worth discussing the factors of the page rank, and I believe that they still matter. The content of links is considered in a special way in our search engine, and anchors frequently provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves, according to Google’s initial article, which discussed link anchor text. In the early years of Google, anchor text had a significant impact on a page’s ranks. The more links you had with “red shoes” as the anchor text, the higher you could rank if you wanted to be found for that term. It became a competition among SEOs to see who could acquire the most exact match anchor text links from high PageRank pages. It was a complete manipulation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and in particular, this is regarded as a link scam, yet it worked (for a while). By the year 2021, excessive anchor text manipulation will likely result in poisonous connections, a manual sanction, or algorithmic changes. The reasonable surfer patent by Google makes reference to the possibility of a link being clicked, which is a major determinant of PageRank. Each link on a page received the same weight under the original PageRank algorithm. While the Reasonable Surfer patent from 2004 suggests that not all links are equally likely to be clicked, assigning varying values to various links based on their likelihood to be clicked. Links in a footer or other comparable locations are another example of links that are less likely to be clicked, as are links to the “terms of service” and banner ads. There is a clear reason why internal linking is a potent SEO strategy. A strong internal linking structure can assist PageRank move around your website, and if you understand how it works, it is simple to understand why this technique can have such a notable influence, especially when linking to sites that aren’t linked to from anyplace else. Our internal linking guide contains more information on how to use this strategy effectively. Prior to recently, NoFollow links prevented the flow of PageRank; however, this is now a hint. The NoFollow attribute has been used by SEOs in the past to control the flow of PageRank on the theory that if a page had 5 external links, PageRank would pass through all but one of them if 4 of them were nofollowed. However, Google’s Matt Cutts stated in 2009 that this would no longer be the case and that PageRank would still be dispersed among links even in the presence of a NoFollow attribute.
In 2021, PageRank is still important.
PageRank is still used even if there is no longer a toolbar that displays it for us to use.
In reality, Gary Illyes from Google verified on Twitter in 2017 that they were still utilizing PageRank.