Typically in these videos, Cutts is responding to a user-submitted question, and that is the case here. The question was: “I use the Google Toolbar to monitor PageRank. I read on the Internet that it gives old and quite unreliable data. Can I have reliable realtime PageRank information about the sites I administer? And how can I idenity causes of a PageRank drop?”

“The information that you get from the Google Toolbar is updated about 3 or 4 times a year, and the reason we don’t provide it every single day is because we don’t want webmasters to get obsessed with the green in the Google Toolbar, and not pay the attention that should be spent on titles and accessibility, and good content, and all those kinds of things,” says Cutts. “A lot of people, if you show them just the PageRank and update it every day, they’re just going to focus on that. So we didn’t want that kind of obsession or backlink obsession to take hold where people would only pay attention to the PageRank in the toolbar.”

This is not the first time we’ve seen Google de-emphasize the need for webmasters to focus on PageRank. Ultimately, while it may be a strong signal used by Google in determining search result ranking, there are over 200 other ones, and the formula changes every single day. Social and location factors have certainly played bigger roles in recent memory. You can bet that Google’s +1s are going to continue to play a strong role.

“The question that it’s ‘quite unreliable’ – it’s not unreliable, it’s just rounded to a zero to ten sort of scale, so there’s nothing unreliable about that necessarily,” says Cutts.

“Then, the question of ‘how can I identify the causes of a PageRank drop’ – well, if the only PageRank that you had, for example, was from one very reputable link, and that site stopped linking to you, that could lead to a drop in PageRank,” he continues. “If you’ve done something really weird with your internal linking, and you canonicalization is very strange, so we don’t know – maybe there’s a completely different site on www vs non-www – so you know, those kinds of canonicalization issues, that can also lead to a PageRank drop.”

“But one of the most common reasons we see for a PageRank drop, at least in the Google Toolbar, is if a site is selling links, and so if your PageRank dropped 30% all of a sudden, and you were selling links that passed PageRank, the reason for that is selling links that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines,” he says. “And if you think about it, it’s a pretty understandable thing. It’s a lot like payola, in the sense that you pay somebody money and that you get a mention, and it’s not adequately disclosed to the search engine. If some site is doing that, that can account for a drop in the Toolbar PageRank.”

“So if that’s what might have happened, all you have to do is remove the links that you were selling, and then do a reconsideration request, and say, ‘Hey, I was selling links, they passed PageRank, I saw my PageRank dropped, and so I’ve removed those links, you can verify it, and please let me regain my trust with Google.’ And so if we see that things look good, and it looks like there’s a good faith effort there, and we’re reasonably convinced the selling of PageRank won’t happen again for example, then often times your PageRank will return.”

You can find the reconsideration request form here.

“If you’ve used Instant on google.com or in Chrome, you’ll be right at home with Toolbar Instant,” says Google’s Allen Huang, Associate Product Manager on the Toolbar. “Just start typing in the search box and search predictions and results will appear instantly as you type, getting you the results you want faster.”

As a Chrome user, I can honestly say that I can hardly remember what it was like before Google Instant from the browser, even though it’s not been available for that long. Most people seem to like it.

“This new version of Toolbar is simpler, cleaner and emphasizes what’s important to you. The tools that you use most will remain visible on the toolbar, while buttons that you haven’t used recently will be moved to the new ‘More’ button,” says Huang. “s you discover and use particular tools that help your browsing experience, like Share or Translate, they’ll automatically appear on the toolbar, making your most relevant tools easy to access. This personalization is stored only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google unless your usage statistics are enabled.”

The toolbar also comes with new privacy settings accessible from a single menu, where you can adjust your preferences for things like PageRank, spell check, and SideWiki.

The toolbar is available in English only, but will be available in other languages in the future. Current Toolbar users will be automatically upgraded over the coming weeks.

Danny Sullivan has dug into this topic again, and got some new quotes from Google fellow Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithm and who wrote a post slamming Bing for its practices after the whole debacle went down. 

"Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation," he said.

Singhal told Sullivan, "We absolutely do not use search activity on other search engines to influence our search  results."

That doesn’t mean Google doesn’t see what’s happening on Bing and other search engines, as Sullivan points out, but Google is sticking to its story of not using that information to influence search ranking. 

Google will evidently be making improvements to its disclosure process, which is somewhat ironic, considering that was a big part of Matt Cutts’ argument when he and Bing’s Harry Shum argued about the whole thing on stage at a recent search event. 

First, Google has added a new share button to the Google Toolbar, which allows users to share any site on the web via their social network of choice. Second, Google announced that with Feedburner, you can now set your feeds up to post to Twitter.

The thing that these two announcements have in common is that they both utilize a new URL shortener from Google. They tried to slip that in their quietly a couple of times, but then went ahead and made an announcement about the service itself.

The shortening service is located at goo.gl, but it is not available for broad consumer use at this point. Google is just using it itself to compliment the aforementioned services. In other words, you can’t just go to goo.gl and shorten a URL yourself. However, Google says that in time, it may offer such an option.

"We think people who use the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner will benefit from a shortener that is easily accessible — making it faster and easier to share, post and email links," Google says. They also say the core goals of the Google URL Shortener are:

- Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
- Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
- Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google’s standard privacy policy applies to goo.gl. The company says that it may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end use clicks.

On a related note, Facebook also now has its own URL shortener.
 

Related Articles:

> Who Owns Your Content?

> Ushering In a Whole New Era of Linking Questions

> Short URL Spam a Big Threat in August

Google has now introduced a Sidewiki bookmarklet that can be used to read and write Sidewiki entries with Google Chrome, Safari, and other browsers. The bookmarklet is just a shortcut that goes in the bookmarks bar of you browser, and when you click it, it opens up a window showing Sidewiki entries for whatever page you’re on.

When using Sidewiki, an expandable window can be viewed on the left-hand side of the webpage. When expanded, you can see the comments that have been written or contribute your own.

Upon introducing Sidewiki, Google said it uses "multiple signals" based on the "quality of the entry," what they know about the author, and other user-contributed signals like voting and flagging. They say they want to only keep the most relevant entries appearing in the sidebar. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan says Google gave him a few other factors like:

- Use of sophisticated language
- User’s reputation
- User’s history

Users’ Google Profiles are said to play a direct role in whether or not comments appear. Google ranks profiles in a PageRank-like manor, so the higher you profile is ranked, the more likely your comments are able to appear.

Related Articles:

> Google Turning the Web Into an Exclusive Social Network?

> Integration – The Key to Google as a Social Network

> Want to Get Your Google Profile Verified?

"To put it simply, we aggregate the URLs visited by our users who opt-in to enhanced features and analyze the resulting data to help us improve our products," says Google Product Manager Aseem Sood. "In that sense, it is similar to our other opt-in mechanisms, like crash reporting in Google Chrome or help center surveys that allow users to provide valuable feedback to us."

"One great example of how this data helps improve our products can be seen in our malware detection efforts," continues Sood. "By getting a better sense of the most visited sites on the web, we’re able to focus Google’s automated malware scanners on the most popular URLs that users are currently visiting. This data is then used to power Google’s SafeBrowsing feature which provides alerts to users searching on Google or who are browsing the web using Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome, that the site they want to visit may harm their computer."

Google also uses the data as a "page load timer". When a user’s browser sends out a request to fetch Google Maps, for example, Google starts the timer. They stop it once the page is finished loading. As you may know, Google has been all about speeding up the web (particularly its own sites).

Google launched the "Let’s Make the Web faster" site back in June, as an initiative to get webmasters to help the company make the web faster. Google also launched the Page Speed Tool, which helps site owners and developers identify ways to make their sites load quicker.

When using Sidewiki, an expandable window can be viewed on the left-hand side of the webpage. When expanded, you can see the comments that have been written or contribute your own.

Google says that it uses "multiple signals" based on the "quality of the entry," what they know about the author, and other user-contributed signals like voting and flagging. They say they want to only keep the most relevant entries appearing in the sidebar. Sullivan says Google gave him a few other factors:

- Use of sophisticated language
- User’s reputation
- User’s history

Google recommends commenters contribute expert insight, helpful tips, background information, and added perspective.

Your Google Profile evidently plays a direct role in whether or not your comments appear. Google ranks profiles in a PageRank-like manor, so the higher you profile is ranked, the more likely your comments are able to appear. "Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing your ProfileRank," says Sullivan.

I’ve discussed numerous times in the past about how Google is becoming one giant social network of sorts, and this seems to indicate that it is on some levels even an exclusive social network. Anyone can participate, but it sounds like you have to be somebody to get in.

"Whether you have a smartphone or a feature phone, if you have mobile internet access you can get the new mobile-optimized Google Search results pages on your phone just about anywhere in the world," says Google in a post on the Google Mobile Blog. "Just go to Google.com in your browser and do a search."

With the new format, users get improved support for universal search.

The Toolbar

The advanced translate feature on the toolbar automatically detects if the language of a page you’re on is different from your default language, and it allows you to translate it. "With one click, you can now instantly translate the page and all of its text will appear in the new language," says Google on the company’s official blog.

A few other things to note about the toolbar: 

- If you go to another page in the same language, you’ll continue to see translated text

- If a page has dynamic content (like Google Reader) you will get translations in real-time

- If you frequently translate pages in the same language, the toolbar will let you translate that language automatically

Languages the feature is available in include: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

The toolbar can be downloaded here. More info can be found here in this help center.

"One of the best things about working on the Google Toolbar team is that when someone says ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Toolbar could…,’ our answer is usually ‘Yes! Let’s build it!"’ And then it’s just a question of when," the Toolbar Product Team says.

Only available in the US right now, the Toolbar with My Location lets Google Maps as well as the included Maps gadget pinpoint your current location, and from there you can search for things and it will show you nearby places. For example, search for pizza, and it will show you nearby pizza places, as well as more local Google results.

Google likens the feature to their IP-based local search results, except that it’s more accurate because it uses Wi-Fi access points. Location info is not associated with the user’s Google account.

The "Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar" has an updated interface, which uses space more effectively, and lets users translate pages with one click, while managing bookmarks in a new sidebar.

"We recognize that due to differences in local language structures, users who speak other languages may have specific needs for browsing the web," the Toolbar team says.

They also point out a few things to keep in mind, like that Toolbar Labs is only available for IE, and that they are only features that are being tested, so there might be bugs here and there.

This feature allows you to open different pages when you open a new tab, so you don’t just get the standard blank white page. Now you can bring up one of your favorite pages or one that you recently viewed. You can choose from up to 9 different thumbnails you have stored as well as recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs:

"You can edit the thumbnails, and all this data remains locally on your browser, which means none of the information about your most viewed sites or recently closed pages will be sent back to Google," explains Software Engineer Sergey Ryazanov of the Toolbar Team. "If for whatever reason you don’t like this updated new tab page, you can always change it back to a blank page or to the website of your choice through either your Toolbar or Firefox settings."

To edit your thumbnails, simply:

1. Open a new tab to view the new tab page.

2. Click the Edit thumbnails link near the bottom of the page.

3. Click the X icon for each thumbnail you wish to remove.

4. Click the Done button.

The second new feature of the latest toolbar release is the ability for Hebrew and Arabic-speaking users to access Toolbar 5, which includes right-to-left text support. Google also notes that some widely reported bugs have been fixed, though they don’t go into specific detail on that.