There's some discussion about this on some other forums: what do you think, should Google remove the pagerank display?
What do you get out of seeing the pagerank for your sites? Does it give you anything to see it on other sites that you might be browsing? If your grandma's browser had a pagerank-bar, how would you explain it to her and what should she make of it?
I wouldn't mind if it was removed from the toolbar but I would still like to see it available through an API.
But then again, since it is not updated all that often it is not all that much use as a diagnostic tool.
How about removing it from the toolbar and creating some sort of tool for the Webmasters tool set but have it be able to access more recent data? Being able to view it using various means, besides just a list of pages and their respective PageRanks would be useful too. Maybe something like a tree structure that can expand and contract at each of the various nodes so one can check through one's site structure more efficiently.
How would I explain it? I'd explain that it may have had something to do with the "authority" of a given page at some point in the past but means nothing this exact minute because she won't know how far in the past it was updated and things can and often do change.
> There's some discussion about this on some other forums: what do you > think, should Google remove the pagerank display?
> What do you get out of seeing the pagerank for your sites? Does it > give you anything to see it on other sites that you might be browsing? > If your grandma's browser had a pagerank-bar, how would you explain it > to her and what should she make of it?
> ... it may have had something to > do with the "authority" of a given page at some point in the past but > means nothing this exact minute because she won't know how far in the > past it was updated and things can and often do change.
I'm wondering: in what kind of situation would it matter to the user how Google assesses the importance of a page? Would you trust a low- PR site less than a high-PR site?
Ditto to what Craig said about removing it from the bar but keeping it within the webmaster's reach as a general overview gauge.
However, if it suddenly got dumped from the Google-Bar, what would the millions of bar-using sheeple out there make of it? Would they suddenly complain that the evil Darth Google has things to hide because they could see the Green-bar-of-madness a minute ago, but now they can't?
There is so much confusion out there about what the little green bar actually does; but on the whole, it has filtered through to users by now that 'more green means more important' in a vague, non-plussed sort of way.
And don't forget that a Green-bar-of-madness enabled Google Toolbar acts as an information gathering tool since it sends back cute & cuddly and totally non-invasive statistical data to its nest [although I guess that this could easily be retained without keeping the PR bar].
On the whole, I guess that it's one of those 'six one way, half a dozen the other' situations.
As for my grandmother, I guess I'd just let her know that the green bar is a measure of how environmentally friendly a site is and leave it at that.
> There's some discussion about this on some other forums: what do you > think, should Google remove the pagerank display?
> What do you get out of seeing the pagerank for your sites? Does it > give you anything to see it on other sites that you might be browsing? > If your grandma's browser had a pagerank-bar, how would you explain it > to her and what should she make of it?
> I'm wondering: in what kind of situation would it matter to the user > how Google assesses the importance of a page? Would you trust a low- > PR site less than a high-PR site?
I've had to wean a surprising number of clients off the whole 'PR is the most important thing since Oxygen' diet.
I think that part of the problem about this was caused by the many start-up SEOs who started cold-calling business owners a couple of years back and filling their ears with a load of drivvel about PR and how their sites would die without it. Back in 2005, before I moved to Cyprus, I lost track of the number of cold-calling SEO salesmen I had to dismantle on a weekly basis, all of whom were singing the same tune about PR and making the same idiotic promises about 'the power of sitemaps, portal pages, link farms, pyramids and the predictions of 'king Nostradamus'.
And sure as sh*t, those business owners would talk to their business owner buddies over a beer on Friday night and pass what they'd heard from these Yahoo [the Ignoranus*, not the search engine] salesmen, thus propagating the whole game of PR chinese whispers.
*Ignoranus = Someone who is not only stupid, but also an a$$hole
Add this general user confusion to the fact that every SEO crackpot out there has their own idea about PR and the little green bar, and you wind up with an SEO soup so thick, you could trot a donkey across it... So I'd say that a great many people out there today will actually trust in the green without first evaluating the level of information on any given site.
Ah, what the hell... 'Death to the Green-Bar-of-Madness', it's caused enough havoc for one century.
I'm greedy. If I've got something in my sticky fingers it's not that easy to tell me that I must return it. Also I'm used to these funny green pixels so I think the toolbar PR display should stay. I'd like to have a tooltip displaying the float though. And of course I want the real page rank per page, section, and so on in the Webmaster tools, and more stuff like that, for example a tool to decrease the PR of pages I dislike because they sell the stuff I deal with way cheaper.
As for my granny, unfortunately she's dead, but last time I showed her a page about her 100th birthday on my laptop I didn't bother to tell her who's responsible for the massive green and all the love sent by the nice folks far away in california. Not that she was able to spot the green without a magnifier, but if she'd have asked, I would have said that Google uses green pixels to draw the picture of my surfing behavior, and that personalized search, history and all that are essential, so just ignoring the activated widget leads to better search results even without letting Google scan my brain for each search query's context. Sebastian
> There's some discussion about this on some other forums: what do you > think, should Google remove the pagerank display?
> What do you get out of seeing the pagerank for your sites? Does it > give you anything to see it on other sites that you might be browsing? > If your grandma's browser had a pagerank-bar, how would you explain it > to her and what should she make of it?
I think it's a matter of when not if - the PR toolbar will go soon.
Google seems to be moving towards a much less 'open' index, and this, like the supps, is probably just another signal that is considered of relatively little use and/or simply perpetuating counter-productive practices like link exchange etc.
I think when G started out, it made sense to have the PR toolbar to differentiate themselves from the crowd - after all, everyone likes 'tools'. These days, though, I guess Google has become a victim of its own success - rather than modelling link structures on the web, it could be argued that PR (and to a certain extent Google itself) now drives the web - which has eroded the value of PR via something I call 'link inflation'.
Google has become so endemic that being at the top of Google rankings tends to dramatically increase your readership, which by the law of averages also increases your inlinks, which increases your PR. Thus a PR driven index would tend to have no 'middle class' - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and you'd now have sod-all chance of ranking well for competitive terms if you were a newcomer.
This 'google as a driver of the web' phenomenon is something I'm particularly certain Google is aware of - hence the move away from PR to a more complex system - with loads of signals. Nonetheless, you can't escape the fact that PR, albeit perhaps a more complex version than the one first postulated by Page et al, will always be a part of the index - things like the introduction of rel=nofollow support my belief that PR is something that has such utility at the moment that even direct behavioral data can't replace it completely.
Google has shown a propensity towards 'security by obscurity' with their index - they're constantly on the move, tweaking the index, acquiring businesses that might give them new data (urchin is one example) - basically, they're a moving target always trying to keep one step ahead of the spammers. Unfortunately as the whole show gets more and more complex I'm feeling that the collateral damage is increasing - it has to, really. Multivariate models have multivariate errors - Google must be aware that the quality of their index is quite central to their success.
Keeping people in the dark about how the index works probably helps reduce the pace of index exploit development - Removing this signal (however out of date and useless it is) would probably be well and truly in line with that trend.
> I think it's a matter of when not if - the PR toolbar will go soon.
It's gone already. The low frequency of pushes contrasted with the volatility of the environment makes it useless for any purpose I can think of.
Google sometimes drops hints. Rarely do they say: "THIS IS A HINT!"
>From the FAQ:
Q: I have a lot of new links pointing to my site but my site's toolbar PageRank has not changed in months.
A: Don't worry :). We actually recalculate PageRank quite frequently, but only push toolbar PageRank updates occasionally. This is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is but one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked.
I'd like to see it dumped. I think PR data should only be available from the webmaster's dashboard. If the company/person that maintains the site wants to give the client access to the area, that's fine but having it private would put an end to a great deal of nonesense. If people can't check it easily, then fake SEO's have one less method to to try and sell you what you don't need.
> There's some discussion about this on some other forums: what do you > think, should Google remove the pagerank display?
> What do you get out of seeing the pagerank for your sites? Does it > give you anything to see it on other sites that you might be browsing? > If your grandma's browser had a pagerank-bar, how would you explain it > to her and what should she make of it?
They'd probably just love to remove it... but doing so would cause so much confusion (just imagine) and disruption that the cost may well outweigh the benefit. I reckon their PR (pub rels) budget would take a serious dent just trying to explain this to the public.
I imagine when they added the pagerank indicator to the webmaster console they may have had an intention of removing TBPR.
As Phil notes, they've been degrading TBPR's usefulness in recent times so not really a concern.
> I think it's a matter of when not if - the PR toolbar will go soon.
> Google seems to be moving towards a much less 'open' index, and this, > like the supps, is probably just another signal that is considered of > relatively little use and/or simply perpetuating counter-productive > practices like link exchange etc.
> I think when G started out, it made sense to have the PR toolbar to > differentiate themselves from the crowd - after all, everyone likes > 'tools'. These days, though, I guess Google has become a victim of its > own success - rather than modelling link structures on the web, it > could be argued that PR (and to a certain extent Google itself) now > drives the web - which has eroded the value of PR via something I call > 'link inflation'.
> Google has become so endemic that being at the top of Google rankings > tends to dramatically increase your readership, which by the law of > averages also increases your inlinks, which increases your PR. Thus a > PR driven index would tend to have no 'middle class' - the rich get > richer, the poor get poorer, and you'd now have sod-all chance of > ranking well for competitive terms if you were a newcomer.
> This 'google as a driver of the web' phenomenon is something I'm > particularly certain Google is aware of - hence the move away from PR > to a more complex system - with loads of signals. Nonetheless, you > can't escape the fact that PR, albeit perhaps a more complex version > than the one first postulated by Page et al, will always be a part of > the index - things like the introduction of rel=nofollow support my > belief that PR is something that has such utility at the moment that > even direct behavioral data can't replace it completely.
> Google has shown a propensity towards 'security by obscurity' with > their index - they're constantly on the move, tweaking the index, > acquiring businesses that might give them new data (urchin is one > example) - basically, they're a moving target always trying to keep > one step ahead of the spammers. Unfortunately as the whole show gets > more and more complex I'm feeling that the collateral damage is > increasing - it has to, really. Multivariate models have multivariate > errors - Google must be aware that the quality of their index is quite > central to their success.
> Keeping people in the dark about how the index works probably helps > reduce the pace of index exploit development - Removing this signal > (however out of date and useless it is) would probably be well and > truly in line with that trend.
> M
> On Aug 11, 7:27 am, IceGiant wrote:
> > > search results even without letting Google scan my brain for each > > > search query's context.
> > Trouble with Google scanning your brain? > > The IceGiant Leadmet-3000 can help!
