Oh No! What Happened To My PageRank?

There has been a lot of discussion and scare on Twitter and within the SEO forums that Google has disabled the Toolbar PageRank scores from working. The truth is, no they have not. As several sites have reported already, PageRank is still alive in the Toolbar, but Google changed the lookup URL. This change has […]

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Pagerank 1306413240There has been a lot of discussion and scare on Twitter and within the SEO forums that Google has disabled the Toolbar PageRank scores from working. The truth is, no they have not.

As several sites have reported already, PageRank is still alive in the Toolbar, but Google changed the lookup URL. This change has prevented third-party tools that check PageRank from looking up a page’s PageRank. If you use Internet Explorer and turn on the Google Toolbar, you will still be able to look up the Toolbar PageRank score. But you may not be able to do so if you use a third-party tool, not until they update their lookup scripts.

The OLD URL:

https://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&features=Rank&ch=8f3b58e04&q=info:[URLHERE]

The New URL:

https://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient-auto&features=Rank&ch=8f3b58e04&q=info:[URLHERE]

Googler John Mueller confirmed this on Google + and added a hint for webmasters to look beyond PageRank.

So do not panic, your site’s PageRank has likely not gone to zero.

For more on PageRank, see our article named What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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