Google Toolbar PageRank not Displaying

Google's toolbar PageRank is not displaying properly since May 27, 2005. We have receive a number of reports on this behavior from different areas across the United States. A few users have reported seeing PageRank displayed during this period on a site here and there but not with much regularity. There are some sites that appear to be displaying PageRank at least on their home pages. Google's own home page has been showing PageRank during this period at times and not at other times.

Thus it appears that Google's Toolbar PageRank is functioning at least to some degree. It appears that the regularity with which PageRank is displayed is not site-dependent, however, we have noticed that higher PageRank sites tend to display PageRank more often during this current period of flux.

Is Google trying to remove the PageRank from their toolbar? They already claim that it is for entertainment purposes only in that true PageRank or how their search engine rankings are calculated are not based on the value that is displayed in the Google Toolbar PR. The problem with this claim is that high toolbar PR does correlate with higher search engine rankings, number of pages indexed, frequency of visits by GoogleBot (Google's web crawler), website traffic, and ultimately business and website revenue generated. In this correlation then, toolbar PR is not just a tool to be used for entertainment as Google claims, rather it is a a useful tool for both webmasters, website visitors, and customers to determine the relative "worth" of the website within the internet community as a whole. As a webmaster, I use the toolbar PR display. As an internet marketer, I use the toolbar PR display. And, as a potential customer, I use the Google toolbar PR display as one of many factors in determining which website I should spend my dollars at.

The Google toolbar PageRank issue does not seem to be a problem with the toolbar software. Packet sniffers can detect the address used by the toolbar to read the PageRank. Visiting these URLs also results in PageRank display problems. We are generally seeing that when PageRank is not displayed, it is because the URL that the toolbar is accessing is returning a 403 Forbidden error. Perhaps this indicates that Google has changed their Checksum algorithm used to fetch the proper URL for a website's PageRank. But then the question is why change an algorithm without updating the software to use the new algorithm? Will Google unveil a new version of the toolbar soon? Or are they trying to phase-out reliance upon toolbar PR? A sample of the 403 error generated is: "Forbidden Your client does not have permission to get URL /search?....[removed] from this server. (Client IP address: [removed]) You do not have permission to send search queries from this IP address. Please login to the Google Admin Console and ensure that this IP is in your list of permitted IPs. Remember that it may take a few hours for a newly added IP address to become activated and able to perform queries. " The odd thing about the behavior is that the URL generating this 403 error may properly display PageRank during one access and display the error with the next access a few seconds later for the exact same URL. Perhaps this is some type of new load-balancing feature for the Google servers to deal with the massive number of accesses generated by widespread use of Google's Toolbar with PageRank enabled.

Possibly, the problem is as simple as a glitch in Google's system. The 403 error is strange and seems to be indicating some type of IP block that is widespread. Maybe someone at Google screwed up and put admin software/routines at the location of the PR lookup. Perhaps they just screwed up in blocking an IP address. Nonetheless, 3 days of downtime for a Google feature is like an eternity.

We welcome all discussion ideas via our contact form and will gladly post responses here with credit to the author.

May 30th, 2005: we are happy to report that it seems that the toolbar PR display is back and functioning normally.

PageRank is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

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