Google Gets Rid Of Toolbar PageRank – Good Or Bad News?

PageRank – the first and probably the most popular Google search algorithm has been officially killed off on Monday, the 7th of March 2016. The 0 to 10 PageRank Toolbar scale was the most used in terms of SEO in the previous decade but during the years was slowly losing positions and will be totally obsolete in the next two weeks.

Google told Barry Schwartz that it takes some more time for all the servers to effectively remove the ranking. Basically, the last PageRank Toolbar update by Google took place on the 7th of March.

Barry does explain in more detail how this is actually carried on and how will it affect the few browser and website tools that still use it:

I should make it clear that Google does use PageRank internally and it is still an important factor in their algorithm. But the external PageRank score shown in these tools and the Toolbar was between 0 and 10, whereas the score used by Google internally is way more complex.

During the last 10 years Google did mention a couple of times that they will never kill PageRank, but they also asked webmasters for feedback on dismissing the algorithm in 2007. These are the facts and PageRank is now in the past. The good thing is that less and less people use it nowadays and it will not have such an effect on our work in general.