I was recently surprised to find out that people still pay a lot of attention to the “green bar” – you know, the PageRank indicator on the Google toolbar.
This person was worried that they were doing a whole lot of linking, but their green bar showed they were a PageRank Zero.
Just don’t worry about this if you notice it on your site. The green bar has been broken for years. Google in it’s *ahem* “infinite wisdom” doesn’t want people to know exactly how they rank pages or what the pages rank is at any one time. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s more that they made a business decision to do make it extremely difficult (if not impossible) to reverse engineer their system. This is good in a way because it limits how much people can game that system. That leaves the playing field more competitive for those of us without million dollar advertising budgets.
In the beginning of the Google toolbar, the green bar was updated about every three months. But back in 2007 we noticed it was longer and longer between updates. Even when it did update, it seemed to be an incomplete update. These days, it is updated so infrequently, it may as well not exist.
That’s how it should be for you – just don’t pay attention to it. “Step away from the little green bar” :)
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