Google removing the PageRank score ?

There was a rumor few days ago about Google removing the PageRank (it was miss interpreted), and i was like…what in the earth is this dude saying, we know (and i recently posted about) that PageRank is the Google’s heart and removing it would be like causing your self a heart attack. It got me curious and i started lurking on the net to see if this guy was just drunk when he did post that or … there was something actually, but it is not removing the PageRank instead it is removing the score, i.e. to not display any longer to the public the PageRank of a site.

Google wants your feedback on removing the PageRank score?

On the yesterdays discussion on WebmasterWorld forum about removing the pagerank tool and after some feedback from other users, Adam Lasnik of Google has written on the thread, where he emphasizes the importance of PageRank.

PageRank is an important signal and remains one of many effective measures of quality, but admittedly it’s often viewed and used/abused in ways that run contrary to the interests of searchers and webmasters. Still, a lot of folks find the PR information useful; it provides a great incentive to try out our toolbar and explore its other features as well.

Later on, Adam solicits advice from the community to offer feedback on what they’d rather see instead:

Given that many of you aren’t so fond of PR info in the toolbar, I’d love to know what feature you woudl like to see.

Mandatory criteria:
– Would have to provide actionable info for webmasters
– Would need to be useful and interesting for the ~99.9% of users who aren’t webmasters

Another interesting comment on this thread i do find is SteveB’s response on “That will help discredit link brokers and link sellers.“, and Steve comments is

That’s absolutely backwards. Link brokers exist to perfrom a real task, not a phantom one. The point is to buy real PR/ranking/value. The toolbar is the single thing that mitigates AGAINST far worse, far more widespread link buying.

Now, you can look at a PR3 page, and, well its freaking PR3. Without the toolbar, a person could look at that same PR3 page, go to yahoo and see it ahs 10,000 links pointing at it. With the toolbar, the page is PR3, ho-hum. Without the toolbar a person could estimate the PR of that page as anywhere from PR1 to PR5 or maybe 6 (since you can see no definite high quality pages linking we can rule out PR7 or above).

So lets get real here. The toolbar keeps link selling in check, to some degree. That is plainly obvious. Without it, every dingbat site online would get 1000+ links to every page it can and sell links based on its volume of links… with links obviously far easier to get than PR.

If Google gets rid of the toolbar, link brokers increase by a factor of ten, easily.

It is a really interesting discussion but i can’t just simply enclose in one post a 4 pages thread, if you want to know more on this discussion you can pass over and read the thread at WebmasterWorld.

How would you feel without the Google toolbar ?

Sharing is caring!