Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Rajesh Kumar on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 12/23/2013).

What is the difference between page rank and toolbar page rank?

What is the difference between page rank  and toolbar page rank. Please tell me.?
This question begins at 00:00:39 into the clip. Did this video clip play correctly? Watch this question on YouTube commencing at 00:00:39
Video would not load
I see YouTube error message
I see static
Video clip did not start at this question

YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Rajesh Kumar: What is the difference between page rank  ;and toolbar page rank. Please tell me.
  • Adam Heaton: Pagerank is a metric used by Google which updates frequently. Toolbar pagerank is the same metric provided by Google at a certain period of time that may or may not update.

    Don't bother with what pagerank a website has, there are sites on page 1 with PR0. Focus on the quality of the site instead.
  • Tim Capper: The original purpose of the toolbar style display of PageRank was seen in Google's own copy of the Open Directory (DMOZ).  ;One might speculate that they'd even designed the capability prior to that time, perhaps even with a view that they could display it right in the SERPs if there were value in it.

    Now, the DMOZ display was not even quite the same as the toolbar one.  ;It had no number scale at all, and early SEOs created little on-screen 'rulers' that could measure the green bar to ascertain a more meaningful value.

    However, the magical green pixie dust really came into its own with the Google toolbar.  ;The Toolbar was a great early example of how Google buy user-data.  ;To get the little PageRank meter, you had to enable the advanced version of the toolbar, which sends usage data back to Google in return.  ;Thus, for the price of simply showing a rough, unexplained meter of relative PageRank, Google were able to get thousands of people to give them all their browser use data.  ;This enabled Google to really understand bounce-rates, depth of interaction, etc.

    Soon, people came up with the idea of incorporating the data from the meter into their own toolbars - without having to use the Google one and not know what data it was reporting back.  ;This was still okay with Google, because, obviously, to ask Google for the PageRank of each and every page you view, you have to send the URL you are asking about to them for them to send back that URL's pagerank.  ;In other words, it still gave them all of the main browsing and visitation and bounce data, just without also being able to tell if you scrolled, etc.

    Thing is, Google soon started work on its own browser entire.  ;Chrome does everything that those toolbars did for them, and a lot more, and on a far wider scale.  ;No matter how big you think the web design and dev community is, I assure you that Chrome's use is a lot bigger.

    What Google got from providing the magic meter of pixie dust was now effectively moot, and outmoded.  ;Chrome made that toolbar feedback irrelevant except for tracking third-party tools use perhaps.

    I suggest reading this Google+ Post on the subject :
    https://plus.google.com/114669336642325477883/posts/cvs4e6YHokx
  • Adam Heaton: +Tim Capper, better response than I could of put together, then again I don't the response will really be as appreciated as it should.

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 12/23/2013).

All Questions in this Hangout