Wednesday 27 July 2016

Google has permanently disabled PageRank in the Toolbar

 

Heads up! Google has disabled the PageRank API (toolbarqueries.google.com). All requests to the API now return PR0. This means you can no longer see the PageRank of your own or other domains and as far as I know this is a permanent change! All PageRank values you can still see here were requested before 14. April 2016! New domains can not be checked and old domains can not be updated anymore.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a value calculated by Google for every URL. In the early days of Google it was an important factor for ranking search results, but nowadays it is only one part of the Google ranking algorithm. For most people it is still a very important criterion for buying a domain. Wikipedia got a very good and more detailed explanation about PageRank.
 Google has permanently disabled PageRank

Why do PageRank Checker show PR0 for every Domain?

Google had two versions of the PageRank. The one they use to rank websites with and another one they released in the Google Toolbar visible to everyone. The first one is only available for Google internally (you can't see this value anywhere!). At 14. April 2016 Google disabled the API the Toolbar and all PageRank Checks used.
After that day the API only returns PR0 for every request.

PageRank Checker "xyz" is still showing PageRank Results, so it must still be possible!

All PageRank Checker that still show results other than PR0 show cached results. They have stored the PageRank for a certain number of Domains, but they can't get fresh results anymore. Also because it is not possible to get fresh results anymore, you can't check if what the Checker is saying is valid or not!

Why is it starting at -1?

Normally the PageRank starts with 0 and ends with 10, but if the domain/url is still unknown to Google (in the sense of PageRank anyways), the PageRank check returns a -1. Other tools indicate this with a gray PageRank bar. After a domain is online for a while, it gets a PageRank of 0 from Google.

Why is the PageRank bar sometimes red?

If the PageRank bar is red it is likely that the PageRank is not valid. If you redirect for example the domain ABC.com on to XYZ.com, ABC.com would show the PageRank of XYZ.com after a while. Every PageRank check for ABC.com would show you the PageRank of XYZ.com. If you remove the redirect from ABC.com, it would keep showing you the PageRank of XYZ.com for a while, but it would not have any positive effect on Googles ranking algorithm.
It does not mean the domain owner has done this in bad faith! It is just how the PageRank system works, but if you are buying domains based on PageRank, you want to know if the PageRank you are seeing is real or not. That is why I've added a fake PageRank check to find those kind of domains and to make it easily visible the PageRank bar is colored red.

How does the fake PageRank check work?

There is a very simple way of checking for fake PageRanks. You have to Google "info:ABC.com". If the result you see does not show the domain you requested, the PageRank is fake. If you see the right domain, the PageRank is real. If you don't get a result, the domain is not indexed at the moment and you can't validate the PageRank this way. You can just click on the PageRank bar to see the Google info result and check it yourself.

What does a orange PageRank mean?

I got a lot of messages telling me the fake PageRank check is not working! Why is the PageRank not red for some domains? The PageRank is clearly FAKE! As the answer before stated I use the Google info result to determine if the PageRank is fake or not. As mentioned Google does not always return a result, so it is not always possible to validate the PageRank. That's why I've added the orange PageRank to mark the Domains that can't be validate using this check. There is a filter for those unsure PR Domains as well.
 - The PageRank could be validated.
 - The PageRank is fake.
 - The automatic PageRank check could not validate the PageRank.

Are all orange PageRank Domains worthless/fake?

Of course not. It just means the PageRank check could not validate the PageRank. It just means Google removed the domain from its index and that happens all the time. One reason for this can be that the domain does not resolve anymore and why should Google keep a domain in its search engine index that does not resolve to a website anymore. For orange PageRank Domains you have to make sure yourself that the PageRank is valid.

Are there other ways to validate PageRank?

  • If you are unsure if the PageRank is real, you can take a look at the links pointing to the domain. A PageRank 5 domain with 0 backlinks is most likely not what you want.
  • Because the fake PageRank results from a redirect to another domain, you can just check for that. If you visit the domain and get redirected to a different domain you should be vigilant.
  • Another good indicator for this is the Alexa ranking page. Alexa has the same problem with redirects, but if you visit the Alexa ranking page for ABC.com, you would see the stats for the real site (XYZ.com).

Will a Pending Delete Domain or Deleted Domain get the old Pagerank back?

The PageRank is calculated from the links pointing to the domain/url. So if the links to the domain will not be removed after you registered the domain, you should get the PageRank back (or close to it in some cases). There are no grantees for this, but my experiences are that you will get it back. The domain has to resolve, it has to be in the Google index and you have to give it some time. Just try it out and make your own experiences with it!

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