A Quick Note About Google PageRank
December 3rd, 2004
This post will deviate a little bit from the general flow of this website simply because this was a very profound email I found in my inbox this morning concerning Google PageRank.
Over the past year I’ve seen so much information regarding PR rankings flying around, it started to make my head spin. I understand that PR is not the end all, be all of how good a website is, but it seems there are still people who believe this.
So once and for all - let it be known that you cannot rely on the Google toolbar to give you an accurate disclosure of a website’s Google worth.
An email from Google via [SEM] via [SEW Forums]:
“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to access this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequently because is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR of zero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn’t been updated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the Google Toolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results so there is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero.”
There you have it - from Google itself, the Google Toolbar PR is for “entertainment purposes only” so take it with a grain of salt.