2007 is the year Google dumps Google PageRank.

Toolbar PageRank that is. It’s a dinosaur that’s received a bullet in the head and it’s wandering about looking for a place to die. It is more and more irrelevant in Google organic search today and the only people cashing in on it are sites that sell it. Bad press for Google? Not at all, Google is giving us what many cried out for after the last Toolbar update 6 months ago. The End of Google ToolBar Page Rank!

• Google hates link sellers - ok
• Marketers hate link buyers with a lot of cash - ok
• Google’s trying to stay relevant by stopping link buyers swamping results - ok
• TBPR is a metric that link sellers use to sell links - ok
• Most want to see PR gone, ok

What’s Google Page Rank good for? Hmmm… it doesn’t seem to make a site do any better in search engines, not as much as natural links, good content, and aging of a domain. High PR pages don’t necessarily get a lot of traffic or better serps.

It’s out of date, months out of date. They won’t make it more relevant, will they? PR chasers (I was one a long time ago) will be able to work it out and “screw” with it again.

Google seems to be able to index pages in minutes now, if it has a good clean link profile and is a couple of months old, so it’s not using PR of a domain as a signal whether or not to index it regularly. It’s probably using the authority or quality or freshness of inbound links or something more accurate to determine how fast it spiders a site.

What’s Google Toolbar Page Rank REALLY good for? Scaring the shit out of link sellers and interlinking bloggers everywhere. Reduce PR network wide, reduce nearly everybody’s PR, roll it out slowly so everybody screams “Google V Link Brokers”, kill the text link industry, mess up everybody’s historical PR profile, scare people into how they manage their sites and get a lot of the web cleaning up their act before they put a bullet in Toolbar PR - Not Real PR, which we never know or see, and is the real metric Google uses to calculate the serps.

Oh and get people blogging about Google and downloading the Google Toolbar (which they have probably got a social networking thingmyjig to replace by now, for Christ sake. Why is Google not bothered about the bad press? I think it’s because Google is giving us what ‘we’ want - an End To ToolBar PR. Just a few months ago many were screaming about dumping PR, and I think Google listened.

The only people that know about Page Rank are usually marketeers who know Page Rank is just vanity, and clients who generally have been fed wrong information about Google PR from marketers who don’t understand Tolbar PR. The only people making money from Toolbar PR is link sellers and crap seo consultants and the only penalty they receive is their links lose the ability to pass PR, so in effect, it’s not them who suffer. It’s the people who have bought useless (or soon to be useless) links from them.

Google Toolbar is pointless if it doesn’t represent at least the historical “democracy of the web” and the quality of a site. Autocratic Google hand editing individual sites PR? That can’t last long.

This is only a verbal from Google. SERPS remain untouched it seems across the net as a direct result of the downgrade because TBPR has no influence. The days are gone when lawsuits followed a PR drop. Google probably can’t detect all paid links and has only one visible measure by which to tell everybody off.

Perhaps it went something like this?

Matt - “OK - We need to get rid of some of the noise to effectively target Paid Links”

Matt - “Hey let’s kill TBPR. Everybody wants it gone, it’s utter shite FUD anyway and everybody knows it.”

Engineer - “Yeah, no bother.

Matt - “Wait a minute. Can you devalue the entire network but feed out particular sites first so that it’s “clear” we’re hitting the link sellers / sites that link out to “unrelated” sites? Devaluing the network will fuck up the link sellers for a while and get us free PR (the proper kind Heh heh).

Engineer - “Just done it. oops I pressed the YouTube button. What a fuck up. OK That’s it done now. I’ll fix YouTube later, oh I forgot, we’re dumping it anyway.”

Matt - “OK, once that’s done, the network’s devalued, bloggers will remove paid links to “irrelevant” sites and we can get our algorithm back out of the noise, probably making it easier to target actual link sellers. Sites which have lost PR will clean up their link profile in an attempt to react to the drop. Then I’ll come along and tell everybody we were responding to their wishes and have removed TBPR from the toolbar. You guys can get that Web2 thingy up and running to replace it.”

Engineer - “Lets kill hurt the link selling industry and at the same time get thousands of others to clean up their site at the same time - sweet”

Would The Web Be Better Off without TBPR?

Probably.

Who’ll Benefit From TBPR going away?

Google of course, in a worldwide publicity stunt hitting the mainstream media in seconds.

And probably the rest of us too.

Will it kill the paid links industry?

Course not. People will find another metric.

That’s just my take on it. I don’t have a clue of course, like everybody else, but it kinda makes sense to me.