It has now been confirmed that Google will be removing their Toolbar PageRank and any external data that is accessed through this will no longer be available to the public. As most of you already know, PageRank is defined as the unique value of an individual’s page based on content, link structure and relevance.
Toolbar PageRank is an add-on feature that tells consumers how much Google trusts an individual page. For years leading up to this, Toolbar was a trusted source for those who didn’t quite understand PageRank and how it worked in search engines.
Google has slowly started to eliminate Toolbar from its search engine. You could no longer access this add-on if you used Chrome or Firefox, and it eventually died out via Internet Explorer a few years later.
So why is it just now being announced to the Google world that this once, fool-proof feature is no longer available, when for years it has been slowly removing itself from the public? We may never know.
You don’t have to worry that your pages will disappear from the Google-verse. Although the external data will be removed, Google explained that they still use PageRank data internally within the ranking algorithm.