WebProNews

Google Toolbar shows historical PageRanks

Users of the Google Toolbar will see updated PageRank values for websites become available over the next few days.

Google's noteworthy engineer Matt Cutts stirred up the SEO world with a little note on his blog. The always-sparkling discussion of PageRank and its secret sauce got a nudge from Cutts with his announcement.

"I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites," he said. "I figured the SEO industry could use something to discuss, so I thought I’d give people a heads-up about the toolbar PageRanks."

Naturally, this little bombshell pulled in plenty of attention from the search engine optimization community. Comments flowed in, with Cutts responding to a handful. In one example, he noted the Toolbar PageRanks tend to update about every three to four months.

One commenter questioned whether or not anyone except site publishers actually bother having PageRank enabled in their Toolbar. Cutts said it was more than the commenter suspected.

"The last time I checked, many many more users turned on the PageRank display than there are site owners. The PageRank display is actually a popular feature, as it turns out," he replied.

It sounds like, on a superficial level, people who use the Google Toolbar don't mind looking to see how popular a site may be, even if they don't fully understand what PageRank. Quite frankly, we're astonished the Wikipedia entry on PageRank isn't required reading in schools these days (we kid, folks).