Toolbar PageRank Update

On 31st December, Matt Cutts confirmed the latest update to toolbar  PageRank. SEO the Game has gone up to a PR-4 from PR-0, however, this is only for the first page.

While we are very pleased at the rapid rise in toolbar PR, it is a very poor metric for the importance of a page and now seems a good time to go over common questions people often ask about this misunderstood number.

The Toolbar Meter

For those that have never seen the toolbar PR meter, it used to be displayed in Google search results as a green bar which can take values of 0 to 10. The toolbar was taken out of the search results some time after but still lives on and can be viewed using a number of Firefox extensions.

The basic idea behind toolbar PR is that is it a measure of the importance of a page. That importance comes solely from the number and value of the links going to a page so the more links that you have with higher PR the greater will be your page’s PR.

Differences between Real PageRank and Toolbar PR

The values of toolbar PR are derived from the calculation of PageRank for individual pages which are calculated continuously but are updated to the public’s toolbar meters once every 3-4 months. Real PageRank is calculated for each an every page and would be a floating point number. So there are two reasons why toolbar PR is limited in usefulness

• it is out of date most of the time.
• it is too coarsely graduated to be useful.

Importance in Ranking

It is also important to mention that PageRank (the Google calculated version) is only one of the factors that go toward ranking a page. While it used to be the main difference between Google and other search engines, today the importance of PR has decreased and new factors such as personalised search results and location based results are just as likely to influence the ranking of sites.

Should Toolbar PR be Removed?

The showing of toolbar PR is also fuelling the market for text-link-advertising because it is often used as a metric for judging the value of a link on a particular page. If Google wish to stop the market for text-link-ads then toolbar PR is obviously something which should be removed. Penalties imposed by Google on sites that sell text-link-ads takes the form of  reducing their toolbar PR but it seems to have any little effect on the rankings of those sites.

Have you had experience of this?