Is Google PageRank Gone? Or is just a Tweak away

So I was creating a blog for a client today and came to my attention that my PageRank bar was returning a 0 or a N/A ( Not Available ) answer, I did not pay that much attention to it, because some times after long hours of work on Firefox, some add-ons crash , so I said to myself, since I was not writing articles today, there was no need for SEO at the time.

But later forums and groups had mixed reactions when they saw that their Google Toolbars and other SEO plugins that had the PageRank Checker where returning values of 0 or N / A. The most reliable PR Checker (Google Toolbar) showed the same error.

After speculation, I came to the conclusion that Google had removed the Google PageRank.But then I thought that Google was not going to take such a drastic measure. But what if it did? Where was all the SEO businesses and gurus out there going to end since their main Website Rate was gone?

After many hours of browsing I came across a Google+ Share John Mueller, ( John Mueller’s Blog ), who is a webmaster trend Analyst at Google Switzerland, share this on his wall

From the update: “It turns out Pagerank is not dead after all. Google has simply updated the URL which is used to query it, which has caused various toolbars and websites to stop reporting the number. Dave Naylor spotted the update and has subsequently updated his own tool, which is now once again reporting PR accurately.”

PageRank is still alive in the Toolbar but Google changed the lookup URL. This change has caused third party tools 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, or you can just hack them like I did with the SEO Status PageRank/Alexa Toolbar from Ruby Web.

The Old URL:

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

The New URL:

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

So don’t Panic Google hasn’t abolish PageRank ( YET )