As of today, May 28, 2005, the Google PageRank has been grey’d out of everyone’s toolbar. Is this just a glitch? Is it a huge update? Is it a move to something new? Or is this the disappearance of PageRank to you and I?

Personally, I believe it will be back anytime, but what if this is a turn towards PageRank being invisible? How does this effect webmasters and most importantly, how does this effect LinkWorth?

LinkWorth has been built around “link popularity”, not PageRank. The reason we do not base prices of links and the way our system works off of PageRank is for reasons just like we’re experiencing today. PageRank can disappear at any time without notice. If this happens and LinkWorth is built specifically around PageRank, then “goodbye LinkWorth”! This would not be a smart business decision, therefore, we focused on something that is the base of EVERY search engine…LINK POPULARITY.

So if PageRank disappeared today, LinkWorth would only benefit. Others in our market who sell text links based on the PageRank of that site will suffer tremendously. While this would help our business, I personally would hate to see that happen to any of those guys. It might just put them completely out of business and that is not good, no matter how you view it. I can only wish the best for those companies.

What does this mean to individual webmasters? Nothing really. Google isn’t going away, they’re just making changes (possibly) to how their search results are displayed and ranked. As long as you are building your link popularity with great relevant inbound links, you are fine.