PageRank Disappears From the Toolbar

The green bar is going

Google has confirmed this week that it is removing PageRank from its toolbar. The small green bar, scored from zero to ten, will stop appearing there and in the tools that read it.

For most business owners this changes nothing. Few have looked at the bar in years.

For link sellers, it changes the sales pitch. Emails offering placements on high PR sites have quoted that number for more than a decade.

The score stopped meaning anything long before this week. Its removal makes that official.

What the number was

PageRank was Google's founding idea: a link from one page to another counts as a vote, and votes from pages that have many votes themselves count for more.

Google's toolbar, for years a common add-on to Internet Explorer, showed a rough version of that score for whatever page you were on. Each step up the scale was far harder to reach than the one below.

The public number was only a rounded snapshot of a far more detailed calculation, refreshed a few times a year at best.

Why it stopped meaning anything

• It was frozen. The public score had not been updated in over two years.
• It counted links, not whether a page answered anyone's question.
• It scored pages, though people quoted it for whole sites.
• It was coarse, with huge gaps hidden between neighbouring scores.
• It could be faked by pointing a domain at a high-scoring site.

The first is the one that ended it. A site launched since the last update shows no score at all, however good its links.

Who used the number, and for what

The bar became a currency. Link sellers priced placements by it, directories charged more for pages with a higher score, and domain sellers listed it beside every name.

Some search marketing reports listed it as a measure of progress, though it had not moved in years.

Business owners glanced at it to decide whether a site was worth a link request or a directory fee.

None of those uses told anyone whether a link would bring customers or help a page rank.

Why the emails were always a risk

Google's guidelines have long treated paying for links that pass ranking credit, or being paid to place them, as a link scheme. A paid link should carry nofollow, an instruction telling search engines not to count it.

Sites in those emails sell to anyone who pays, which is the pattern Google looks for. A page linking to a hotel in Bali, a dentist and a roofer in one paragraph is easy to spot.

The consequences range from links quietly ignored to a manual action: a penalty imposed by a reviewer at Google, reported in Search Console, which can push a site well down the results.

The buyer carries that risk. The seller has already been paid.

A worked example

A call answering service with a dozen operators, covering nights and weekends for clinics, trades and property managers, competes for searches across the province rather than in one town.

Four years ago it paid a monthly fee for links described as PR4 and above, with a report each month listing the score of every new site.

Eighteen months later a message in Webmaster Tools, as Search Console was then called, reported unnatural links pointing to the site. Its pages slid off the first page of results for the searches that mattered most.

The cleanup took most of a year: emails asking site owners to remove links, a disavow file listing the domains that never answered, and a reconsideration request explaining what had been done.

The penalty was lifted. The owner still gets weekly emails offering high PR links, and deletes them unread.

Links still count

None of this means links stopped mattering. Google uses them inside its ranking alongside many other signals; only the public number is going.

The links worth having are earned by being part of a trade and a town: a supplier's dealer page, a trade association's member list, the local paper covering a project, a charity thanking its sponsors.

They tend to be few, slow to arrive and impossible to buy in bulk. That is what makes them worth something.

What to look at instead

Search Analytics, inside Search Console, shows which queries bring up your pages, how many clicks each one earns and your rough position. That is Google's own view of your site, not an estimate.

The Links to Your Site report beside it lists who links to you, which is where anything odd shows up.

In Analytics, the referrals report shows which linking sites actually send visitors. A link that has sent nobody in a year is doing very little.

The plainest measure is still the most useful: whether calls and enquiries are coming in.

Judging a link without a score

Three questions do the work the green bar only pretended to do.

Whether the site is about your trade, your area or your customers. Whether a real person would read the page and click through. Whether you would still want the link if search engines did not exist.

And if someone wants money for a link that is not marked as advertising, the answer is no, whatever number comes with it.

The next number in the emails

The sellers will not stop. Expect the same emails quoting a different score, from one of the companies that estimate link strength with their own crawlers.

Those scores can help someone auditing hundreds of links. They are not Google's view, and a high one does not make a paid link safe.

Treat any number in an unsolicited email the way you would now treat PageRank: as a sales figure.

The counter-case

A business that has never bought a link has nothing to do this week beyond ignoring the next sales email.

A business that bought links years ago without trouble may wonder whether to act now. Checking for paid placements is sensible; tearing down every old link in a panic is not.

For decisions about your own site, though, judge links by relevance and real visitors, and never pay for one that is not marked as advertising.

Before the next link offer

1. Delete any email selling high PR links.
2. Open Search Console and check Manual Actions.
3. Read the Links to Your Site report.
4. Note any links you ever paid for.
5. Check referrals in Analytics for real visitors.
6. Drop PageRank from any report you receive.
7. List three local links worth earning.

Step four is the one with consequences. A paid link that passes ranking credit is a risk whatever score it came with, and a list of them is what any cleanup starts from.

Search Console also shows a different problem, a site Google cannot see at all, as in a redesign that blocked Google without anyone noticing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.