Google Removes PageRank Toolbar

[sharminakter]

The original patent has apparently been superseded by this new patent , filed by Google in 2006.

This patent refers to "source sites in trusted source sets" and defines them as "...specially selected high-quality pages that provide good web connectivity to other non-source pages", with two examples given being the Google directory (which was still online when the patent was filed) and the New York Times.

"Source sites should be reliable, diverse enough to cover a wide range of areas of public interest, and well-connected to other sites. They should have a large number of useful outbound links to facilitate the identification of other useful, high-quality pages, acting as hubs on the web."

The new patent aims to assign a ranking score to a web page based on its distance from a source set. That said, the patent doesn't actually reference PageRank (and doesn't claim to be an updated version of the algorithm).

The SEO community has instead understood it to be a PageRank modifier based on the proximity of the set of source sites.

PageRank Patent
After nearly 15 years, Google stopped updating its toolbar (the last confirmed update was in December 2013). It was completely retired in 2016.

Of course, this doesn't mean that Google has stopped using estonia phone data PageRank as part of the algorithm. It just means that PageRank has stopped being a public metric.

Why Google Removed the PageRank Toolbar?
SEOs have become obsessed with PageRank. It has quickly become the most important SEO tactic, even ahead of creating quality content and a solid user experience.

Problem: A public PageRank score was easier for SEO specialists to manipulate.

SEO specialists knew how to use PageRank to rank their websites higher. And they took advantage of it.

From Google's perspective, it was the public PageRank toolbar that was the problem. Without it, there was no accurate measure of a web page's authority (at least officially). This made it harder to manipulate the score.