Google's infamous PageRank scoring system is fading away for good, as the company has recently confirmed to an SEO-related news blog that it plans on removing any public access to this feature.
PageRank, released in 2000, is a blessing and a curse at the same time. The algorithm takes Web pages and ranks them on a scale from one to ten based on a series of factors, like the number of incoming or outgoing links.
While the PageRank system helped Google put the Internet's "things" in order and makes them easy to find at any time, it also created the underground SEO economy we all know today, with shady companies spamming anyone that can listen about their ability of boosting your PageRank score and placing sites on Google's frontpage.
First introduced to the world as a simple red-to-green indicator in the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer, the PageRank metric was also added to a bunch of other Google-related services.
But as Google started to better understand how the Web works, and as other technologies surfaced as more appropriate alternatives to the PageRank scoring system, the company slowly moved away.
The PageRank score was never displayed inside Google Chrome, PageRank scores were dropped from the Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) way back in 2009, and the Google Open Directory website, which also showed PageRank metrics, was shut down in 2010.
After the company also decided to discontinue the Google Toolbar for Firefox in 2011, the only place where SEO bots and services could query and pull a site's PageRank remained the IE Google toolbar. Unfortunately, even that tool was useless most of the time, as Google updated the toolbar's public PageRank scores once in a blue moon, with the last update dating back to 2013.
