Good News – No PageRank Toolbar on Google
As what we learned, PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and PageRank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own. Before last year, PageRank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you’ve installed the Google toolbar.
On 2016, google decided to remove PageRank scores form public view. For all the users, this is such a good news that you do not have to receiving crappy emails, or garbage comments with link drops. When Google first stared, PageRank was something it talked about as part of its research papers, press releases and technology pages to promote itself as a smarter search engine than well-established and bigger rivals at the time — players like Yahoo or AltaVista. Google released the first version of the toolbar to make it easy to search Google directly from within IE. It also gave those who enabled the PageRank meter to see the PageRank score of any page they were viewing. However, this also give “sellers” chanced to review the “buyers”, and fake the PageRank to increase their profit. If they want better PageRank, they want links, and so the link-selling economy emerged. Networks developed so that people could buy links and improve their PageRank scores, in turn potentially improving their ability to rank on Google for different terms. All these demonstrate that how terrible Google make PageRank visible to the Public. It’s really wised that it has been removed.
Reference:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-pagerank-official-shuts-doors-public/161874/