As we reported early last month, Google began officially killing off toolbar PageRank. It started on March 7 2016 but it officially ended this past Friday, April 15, 2016.
Any last remanent of Toolbar PageRank was officially shut off by Google. They closed the hose, the feed, to obtain the toolbar PageRank data.
All the Toolbars that worked in Internet Explorer 6 or any of the web based tools that scraped the data, they have been officially closed down.
As I said last month, I should make it clear that Google does use PageRank internally and it is still an important factor in their algorithm. But the external PageRank score shown in these tools and the Toolbar was between 0 and 10, whereas the score used by Google internally is way more complex.
Google has been killing off PageRank in the toolbar for years and years. In 2007, Google asked webmasters for feedback on removing PageRank and then in 2009, Google removed showing PageRank like data in Webmaster Tools (Search Console). But in 2013, Matt Cutts told us Google probably will never kill off PageRank in the toolbar. Well, Matt is no longer there and it was done.
Then in 2012, Google stopped updating external PageRank by accident updated PR in December 2013. Since then Google told us time and time again that Google will never update PageRank in the toolbar again.
The thing is, I keep getting emails from people shocked Google killed it off. It is gone, let's move on.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help.
