Google’s last Toolbar PageRank update, which rolled out on December 2013, may have been its last as Google’s John Mueller stated in a recent Google Hangout.
A question was asked by a frustrated individual who couldn’t understand why so many spammy sites selling PR6 backlinks had not been dealt with despite having been reported to Google multiple times.
Mueller’s response is as follows:
“There are a few things where we do take action that you might not see directly. Toolbar PageRank is something that we have not updated for about a year now, and we’re probably not going to be updating it going forward… we have a lot of way to recognize these problematic links, and the sites selling those links, that essentially blocks the PageRank from passing through those sites.”
You can hear Mueller’s response in the Google Hangout recording below:
Mueller also mentioned that he would go through the individual’s list of spammy sites to see if he can find anything that Google’s algorithms aren’t picking up on.
So Mueller really dropped two interesting pieces of news here. One was that PageRank will (most likely) not be updated going forward, and the second was that Google has measures in place to stop do-follow backlinks from passing PageRank if they’re on a site that Google finds to be especially spammy.
With this information now out in the open, I can only hope that the customers keeping these sites in business eventually stop buying links and we start seeing this trend going away.
A hat tip going to SERoundtable for alerting me of this Google Hangout.
