14 DAY TRIAL // Google's infamous PageRank scoring system is fading away for good, as the company has recently confirmed to an SEO-related news blog that it plans on removing any public access to this feature.
PageRank, released in 2000, is a blessing and a curse at the same time. The algorithm takes Web pages and ranks them on a scale from one to ten based on a series of factors, like the number of incoming or outgoing links.
While the PageRank system helped Google put the Internet's "things" in order and makes them easy to find at any time, it also created the underground SEO economy we all know today, with shady companies spamming anyone that can listen about their ability of boosting your PageRank score and placing sites on Google's frontpage.
PageRank was created to help Google rank websites in its beginnings
First introduced to the world as a simple red-to-green indicator in the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer, the PageRank metric was also added to a bunch of other Google-related services.
But as Google started to better understand how the Web works, and as other technologies surfaced as more appropriate alternatives to the PageRank scoring system, the company slowly moved away.
The PageRank score was never displayed inside Google Chrome, PageRank scores were dropped from the Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) way back in 2009, and the Google Open Directory website, which also showed PageRank metrics, was shut down in 2010.
After the company also decided to discontinue the Google Toolbar for Firefox in 2011, the only place where SEO bots and services could query and pull a site's PageRank remained the IE Google toolbar. Unfortunately, even that tool was useless most of the time, as Google updated the toolbar's public PageRank scores once in a blue moon, with the last update dating back to 2013.
With Google now saying that it's removing PageRank scores from the IE toolbar, there will be no more other places to get scores from.
PageRank remains a core ranking algorithm, will be used privately
But the PageRank system is not going away for good. Google has said that the system will continue to be used internally, and the only difference is that we won't know what scores websites are assigned anymore. Of course, we barely knew in the past three years since Google wasn't updating it, and to tell the truth, few of us cared enough to check.
As it was probably visible for many SEO experts keeping an eye on Google's movements, PageRank has lost some of its mojo as the company deployed newer algorithms for ranking content and classifying content, such as EigenTrust, TrustRank, SimRank, and the recently released RankBrain.
As for the SEO economy, things are going to continue as they were. The entire black hat SEO underground that was built primarily because of the way PageRank worked will continue to operate, as it did in the past years, in spite of the fact that Google was slowly phasing out PageRank.
The SEO economy is just too big right now to fail just because Google decided to stop showing a number from one to ten next to each domain.