SEO BLOG

Recently there is a lot of Buzz in SEO message boards and forums, Google didnt update their toolbar Pagerank for about 2 1/2 months now and everyone, especially full time Toolbar watchers are annoyed, I am personally a guy who is obsessed about Pagerank, I had given Lectures and presentations about Pagerank and its importance to rate a site in some software companies, computer training institutes and in some colleges, When I first learned about Pagerank, i was overwhelmed by its quality way of rating a site, But nowadays as we all know it is abused too much, People started rating a site quality based on the Pagerank of that site, This is 100% wrong, Pagerank is just one factor of google there are many other important factors,

Pagerank is exploited too much, Link mongers are excellent in exploiting pagerank and its importance, They just do brokering for people to buy high pagerank links from other industry established sites and the linking site will get a good boost of Pagerank, We know these things are pretty annoying to google since their results get manipulated very easily, So what is the real mission of google not displaying pagerank update on their toolbar, As a SEO market watcher i can speculate some reasons why google is not updating their toolbar Pagerank,

I am going to divide the speculation into 3 important categories,

1. Possible Causes for not updating toolbar indicator for a long time:
a.) IPO Confusion: As Everybody knows Google is active into their Public offer, I have posted many updates in my Blog on the IPO Progress, Google didnt do too well as expected but still they didnt do badly in their first stock sale, Stock price reached more than 100$ and google should be happy with it, So will IPO be the cause of a delayed Pagerank update, I dont know but it is pretty confusing to say, it could be one reason, Google wouldnt have asked for more problems due to people loosing Pagerank or what so ever, I hope they would have been worried of all the blasting they get after a Pagerank update, We have seen this now and again where there is a page rank update in google everybody comes to forum to discuss their Pagerank changes and it ends up to be a Google bashing thread,

b), Google toolbar Checksum code released in Open source - Via SEO discussion forums: People who are active in forums should be knowing that Toolbar hack/Checksum generator code was released in open forums and many many sites started using the toolbar hack, This code will help to automatically retrieve pagerank from google datacenters, This should be a disaster for google, Many people used toolbar for Pagerank purpose and if that pagerank is calculated using automated tools why do people need toolbar then, So it could be a major reason google didnt update the toolbar pagerank indicator,



c). Googleguy a google employee once suggested Google might be moving into to quarterly toolbar Pagerank updates, Nobody took it serious at that time now everyone is speculating that it could be a reason google is not updating its toolbar, SO will it update in the end of september or middle of september who knows what is in google people's mind,

d.) Another possible important cause is the massive link brokering happening out there, As we all know there are a lot of link brokering companies out there, than it was before 6 months, it is due to the effect of anchor text search engines feel important for ranking algorithms, For google as we all know links from high Pagerank pages will boost the pagerank of the page it is linking to, So high pagerank links means high pagrank for target site and this is one big business tactic of all those link mongers, This is a major exploit in google's pagerank algorithm and this could be an other reason google didnt update their Pagerank,

e.) Another possible reason is the Stanford Patent on google's Pagerank, Pagerank was developed when Sergey Brin and Larry page were still PH.D Candidates of Stanford University, So the original Pagerank Patent is owned by Stanford University, Due to this google might be moving away from Pagerank and inventing better way evaluating the quality of a Page, As we know already they are doing this and Pagerank is less important these days and their part in google's ranking algorithm is pretty less compared to the way it was before,

Following extract is taken from the Google IPO Prospectus- http://www.ipo.google.com/data/prospectus.html#toc59330_15,
"The first version of the PageRank technology was created while Larry and Sergey attended Stanford University, which owns a patent to PageRank. The PageRank patent expires in 2017. We hold a perpetual license to this patent. In October 2003, we extended our exclusivity period to this patent through 2011, at which point our license is non-exclusive "

Original Google's Pagerank Patent with US Goverment

But to the contrast of this point we have proof that google still has Pagerank in mind, Recently the Google Directory was updated with the more recent pagerank of the site, So Pagerank is still there only Toolbar Pagerank is not there, But we should remember Toolbar Pagerank and Google Directory Pagerank has a complete different logorithimic scale,

f) Another Possible reason I could speculate is to stop people valuating link exchanges based on
Pagerank, Today as many of us have noticed when we send a link exchange request, we get reply from people saying your linking page Pagerank is too low or you have to have minumum Pagerank of 4 to exchange links, Many people do this because they have a bad opinion that google will value only links with Pagerank of 4 and above, Also some think linking to sites with lower Pagerank than their sites will hurt them, This is completely a Myth story, Google doest value all links they dont have any PR4 cut off of links, Google algorithm dont penalize/hurt sites for linking to low Pagerank sites, A link is a link it rarely hurts unless we link to a really bad neighbourhood, Link exchanges can be an other reason google is not updating their Toolbar pagerank,

h) Designing a different Toolbar Pagerank code and one that is not accessible to coders, This option directly correlates with the Checksum release, If google continues to use the same checksum code then lots and lots of more sites will be using automated Pagerank checkers and their toolbar Users will become less,

Benefits for google:-

List of benefits for google for not updating their toolbar pagerank:

a.) They can virtually stop people valuing links based on pagerank, It prevents a lot of exploiting
of their Pagerank algorithm, People will stop buying links based on Pagerank if they dont see any Pagerank update on the toolbar,

b.) Link Mongers cannot do link brokering business based on Pagerank, As we have seen many auction sites are selling and buying links based on the Pagerank of a site, This will be completely stopped and these text link brokers will have to find other ways to judge the quality of a link, A very big gift for google which they will be ready to take, The base Algorithm on which Pagerank was build upon can be stopped from a lot of exploit,

c.) Benefit of a quarterly Toolbar Pagerank update ( if it ever exists), New sites have to wait for
3 or 4 months for their Pagerank and they can concentrate more of increasing the quality of their site than building 1000s of links to increase their Pagerank and anchor text power,

d.) Stop Automated Pagerank queries, Many sites now use automated Pagerank checkers instead of Google toolbar and this will be really frustrating for google, So when they stop toolbar Pagerank update automatically news will be spread through forums and people will stop using automated Pagerank checkers,

Potential loss for google: -
a.) People who use Toolbar specifically for pagerank purpose will uninstall the toolbar, Most of the users who use Toolbar for the purpose of seeing Pagerank are webmasters/site owners/SEOs so i dont think it will be a big problem for google since their end users the search users are not affected by it,

b.) Pagerank display on their toolbar is high potential marketing tool for them, It has become
fashion these days to have high pagerank and if this attraction fades off google might potentially
loose many toolbar users,

c.) An other loss for google is they cannot misguide many Amateur SEOs/webmasters if they dont do a Pagerank update, This makes many Spamming SEOs directly targeting their search results and this is kind of dangerous,

Resulting consequences from normal toolbar users and my comments on it, I personally spread the word about pagerank display and google toolbar to more than 1000 people( all software people and software training institute guys ), Most of them were obsessed on it and started using just by my word, Almost 800 google toolbars were installed because of me, They were happy seeing the Pagerank of each other's sites and pagerank of other big sites, Now I told the same people pagerank display is no more a priority for google and they haven't updated it for more than 2 1.2 months, Now almost 500 google toolbar's were removed, Nobody were interested in other features since they are not SEOs or webmasters, They are just normal users they like to see the pagerank of different sites, Now without Pagerank updating they hate the toolbar sticking on their IE window, They seem to prefer Yahoo companion toolbar more now,
Dont know what the motive of google is, Google toolbar users are the same as google users, Most of them came through word of mouth, I bet there are 1000s of Non SEOs/site owners/webmasters toolbar users who are ready to remove their toolbar if they come to know there are no more toolbar pagerank updates, So lets wait and see what google does,