Google Officially Turns Off All Public PageRank

If you were grasping onto the last visible signs of PageRank after Google officially announced the start of PageRank being turned off for SEOs, you will now have to go through PageRank withdrawl… Visible PageRank is now a thing of the past.

Multiple users reported that the visible PageRank both within the toolbar and in various SEO tools seemed to be turned off permanently early Saturday.

Google announced that they were turning off access to visible PageRank earlier this year, after years of showing very outdated information from years earlier.  Despite the fact it wasn’t being updated, people were still citing the metric for link selling and others were refusing to upgrade to HTTPS for the sole reason that visible PageRank wouldn’t follow to the HTTPS version of the URLs, since they were technically new URLs.

The final removal of PageRank doesn’t mean anything for SEOs, other than the metric not being visible.  Google is still using PageRank data internally (which is updated).  And previously, a Google spokesperson told The SEM Post:

No, this update does not change anything for webmasters or SEOs in how their sites show up in search. Webmasters can use Search Console to get details about their content’s presence in Google Search, including information about links pointing to their sites. As the Internet and our understanding of the Internet have grown in complexity, the Toolbar PageRank score has become less useful to users as a single isolated metric. Retiring the PageRank display from Toolbar helps avoid confusing users and webmasters about the significance of the metric.

So RIP toolbar PageRank.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post

Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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