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December 01, 2004
Google says PageRank just for fun
Oh, how the webmasters who watch the PageRank indicator in the tool bar must feel like monkeys being thrown peanuts. :)
PageRank has pretty much become a commodity since 2001, when Bob Massa infamously used SearchKing as an enterprise for selling PageRank - and famously took Google to court for penalising his site in Google's rankings for doing so.
Since then, sales and purchases based entirely on PageRank became the norm - until June 2004, when Google stopped updating the Google toolbar on a roughly monthly basis. The following update was not not until October 6th 2004. This left PageRank brokers not only uncertain of if and when their sites were being penalised, but also what the actual value of their commidity actually was.
Anyway, according to John Galt at SEW, in the thread Google says: Toolbar PageRank is for entertainment purposes only, he allegedly quotes a "Google Rep" with the comment:
"The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for
entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to
access this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequently
because is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in the
Google Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR of zero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn't been updated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the Google Toolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results so there is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If a site is showing up in the search results, it doesn't not have a real PR of zero, the Toolbar is just out of date"
Possibly the most official word yet on the purposes and application of the Google Toolbar.
What's most insiduous, though, is having encouraged the webmastering community to install the Toolbar to provide Toolbar PageRank (in return for free information on demographics and user behaviour), not only has Google almost certainly withdrawn the PR carrot, but many webmasters are so used to using the toolbar installed that it seems more problematic to break old habits and uninstall the toolbar.
A win-win for Google, and tactics of "shepherd marketing". :)
Posted by at December 1, 2004 07:01 PM
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