Pagerank toolbar all greyed out Options

[az266]

Most sites have the Google toolbar greyed out at the moment - something afoot?

[HHI Golf Guy]

My best guess is that Google has permanently disabled toolbar PR because of what they feel are link manipulation or un-natural link strategies. If so, they have put a lot of text link brokers out of business.

They could also be in the midst of a major update. Maybe something to do with 302 redirects.

Then again, it might be as simple as a system wide glitch.

It looks like a BL update started rolling the other day. Coincidence?

I guess we will just have to wait and see what the Big G has in store for us.

[bragadocchio]

I'm seeing a gray toolbar for all of the sites I'm visiting now, too.

It's early to say that this is a sign that Google is permanently disabling pagerank in the toolbar. Would be interesting if they did. Even if this was nothing, imagine if the toolbar went on vacation for a week.

There were widespread reports earlier today that cached pages weren't showing earlier today. They seem to be fine now. But, I can't help but draw a connection between the two.

If page rank stopped showing in the toolbar, would less people use it? I'm guessing so.

[bwelford]

Yes, it's still grayed out this morning.

Another interesting question to ask is:
Why doesn't Google say something about this?

Can Google win any brownie points with their 'customers' by not saying anything?

Will some people like me, who have a general good feeling about Google, be irritated by this god-like behaviour? Every time they do this I am confirmed that they just don't know what modern business is about.

It's the old power thing in big corporations. Keep your head down and wait till it blows over. I was most amused by two stories I read this week. BP has issued a new policy that any media vehicles carrying BP ads must vet any articles to ensure they do not carry any negative stories about BP. This contrasts with another story that China allows bloggers who are now appearing in great numbers. It's causing all sorts of waves but it's happening anyway. It's intriguing to see that China would have got it so much more right than do BP and Google.

It's the information age, Google.

[jonksharpe]

I came over to see what was going on after seeing my site loose it's pagerank.

Could this not just be Google making changes to the Pagerank Algorithm?

I don't thinks Google will put an end to toolbar Pagerank because as bragadocchio says, it's one of the major reasons that people use the toolbar and people would uninstall it by the millions if Google ended Pagerank.

My guess is that google is making some sort of changes, or an update the makes it impossible for them to display the pagerank for a few hours/days.

[bragadocchio]

Google's been quiet on the subject.

I don't think that it necessarily means a change to the pagerank algorithm. Chances are pretty good that Google has made a number of changes to page rank over the years without a mass graying of the toolbar indication of ranking everytime that they do.

I'm still seeing pagerank showing for pages in the Google Directory, but the directory sort of seems like something on Google's back burner these days.

I mentioned above that there were reports of cached pages not showing yesterday. There may be some type of problem with the servers that feed pageranks to the toolbar.

If Google were going to remove pagerank from public view, is this the way that they would. I don't think it is. This has more of a feeling of a glitch of some type.

[HHI Golf Guy]

As far as changes to the PR algorithm, I have always believed that toolbar PR was nothing more than a link populatity meter - maybe a snippet of what Google considers true PR to determine the SERP's.

Of course, it is way too early to jump to conclusions, but it is fun to speculate. Barry is right - Google should make some sort of announcement.

If it is permanent, then a lot of people are out of business or need to drastically change their business model. I think that there is a very good chance that G wanted to kill off all of the PR brokers.

Another repercussion of no longer having toolbar PR are the owners of the millions of paid directories all over the web. Are they still valuable? Maybe. But once again they need to find a better way to market themselves.

I think that most will fall by the wayside. It doesn't take a lot of creativity to build a directory. It may be too much for some of these directory owners to come up with a business plan for survival.

[AbleReach]

I googled around and found that this grey toolbar all over the place thing has happened before. I didn't see anything from Google about why it happened then, either.

Maybe Google needed to turn off the PR bar while working on something. Maybe it is a glitch they're tracking town - something to do with caches and indexes?

I doubt they're discontinuing the little green bar. It garners too much buzz for Google and the Google toolbar.


Elizabeth

[esoos]

The buzz value of the Google Toolbar PageRank may have reached a point of diminishing returns. These days it's mainly propping up an industry of selling links based on PageRank. Google could chop this off at the knees with one fell swoop.

Or could they?

I noticed that text-link-ads.com no longer mentions PageRank when pricing links. Instead, they've switched to exclusively focusing on Alexa rank. Maybe they're getting ready for the inevitable.

In any case, it's too early to tell. It is Memorial Day Weekend in the 'States, and web traffic is down. Would be an ideal time for Google to temporarily close down PageRank for repairs.

[dvduval]

I think they may be running a complete pagerank update. Remember, it takes many iterations to get true pagerank for all pages. I think in the past they just did incomplete calculations because of the immensity of the data set. I'm thinking they may have reached a point where they have enough hardware and processor power to recalculate the whole index.

[Ruud]

I'd be happy if they got rid of it. Imagine working without it: no more "arguments" about whether or not a campaign should focus on it....

I mentioned above that there were reports of cached pages not showing yesterday. There may be some type of problem with the servers that feed pageranks to the toolbar.

Throughout the last week instead of getting cached pages I've been getting a server error page from Google. Last 24 hours seems to have been fixed though.

In IE I uninstalled and re-installed the toolbar. The fact that the pagerank option is still there stongly suggests Google isn't backing away from displaying it, one would say.

[Ruud]

Seems like Google is fed up with PR queries. When you access the URL associated with this and other information you get a 403 Forbidden message. Try it for Google itself.

[Eddie]

At the end we couldn't remember what position one little green switch should have been in so we left it 'off'. I doubt it does anything important anyway.

All that paranoia and the answer was there all along :roll:

http://marissaspr.blogspot.com/

[rustybrick]

too bad that blog isnt real.

[bragadocchio]

Page rank is returing to sites now, but it looks like it's easing in slowly, so don't panic if your's hasn't returned in your toolbar yet.

It sounds like Google was installing some new infrastructure over the holiday weekend.

I've checked a few sites, and some have pagerank again, and it hasn't yet returned to others.

[dvduval]

I had a site that was greyed out before the grey out, and it now has pagerank again, so maybe they fixed some bugs now.

[bragadocchio]

I was hoping that for one site I have.

It shows a gray bar when I'm in one location, and a green bar when 20 miles away. I have no explanation. It's been like that for over a month now.

[bwelford]

As usual with Google, no news is no news. So I guess it's back to scheduled programming.

As usual, Barry S has the story.