Google PageRank Issues

Yesterday afternoon, Google's cached pages servers went down, shortly thereafter, all pages stopped displaying PageRank ™ - which, according to Google, is "the heart of our software".

Dozens of worried webmasters, fearful that their "green fix" was gone and would never come back, posted on forums like WebmasterWorld, to express their anxiety at not seeing Page Rank on their indicator bar in a virtual equivalent of heroin withdrawal.

But what is PageRank? Many experienced promoters have been stressing that the page rank meter on the Google Toolbar is wildly inaccurate at best, essentially useless. What they really mean is that PageRank used to trump other factors, that Page Rank used to be one of the most important factors of the ranking algorithm. This eventually changed, as PageRank was abused, bought, swapped and sold like any other commodity, and Google eventually shifted the emphasis to anchor text.

Of course, like Page Rank, anchor text was quickly abused, as evidenced by the massive flood of guestbook and blog spamming that created thousands of anchor text links to affiliate sites allowing them to rank for incredibly competitive terms within 48 hours.

Now it seems that Google is attempting to fight anchor text spamming with their "sandbox" algorithm, combined with algo adjustments like Google Update Bourbon - have really shifted the power of anchor text only from on-theme pages and on-theme sites.

What this means is that a real estate site will benefit more from a link from another real estate site than a Britney Spears fan page.

What does this all have to do with Page Rank disappearing? I think that PageRank is just temporarily offline - perhaps they are going to implement an uncrackable encoding system to defeat the myriad of unofficial PageRank tools and sites, if not Google is going to have to do a lot of updating:

Page Rank Display

Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar’s PageRank ™ display to tell you how Google's algorithms assess the importance of the page you're viewing.

As Brett Tabke, founder of WebmasterWorld said, "If they were going to [get rid of PageRank], the feature would just be removed from the toolbar."