UPDATE July 2016: As of October 2014, Google has no plans to update Toolbar PageRank any longer.
UPDATE: I communicated with Matt Cutts about this post, and here is a portion of what he said in response:
“PageRank option for IE toolbar is available under Toolbar Options (click on wrench icon on right) -> Privacy -> Enhanced features. You can Turn ON/OFF PageRank by checking/unchecking “Use PageRank to see Google’s view of the importance of a page” option.”
So this means that the current page of instructions on how to enable PageRank in the toolbar is inaccurate. I have asked him when this will be updated and will let you know when I get a response.
Original Post
I was working on an article this morning and wanted to get a screenshot of the Google Toolbar showing PageRank. I normally use Chrome, so I don’t use the Google Toolbar, and the Chrome extension I was using did not show a nice little green bar which is what I wanted for my post. The first thing I did is I opened up Internet Explorer and went to the page to install the Google Toolbar. The install went as expected. So far, so good.
However, I began fishing around in the options menu to find out where to click the box to enable the PageRank meter. I couldn’t find it. Next up, I went to the Google Support Forums to see what I was doing wrong. Here is their page on how to enable the PageRank meter:. The screenshot shows where the checkbox is to enable the feature resides:
Great, but I would have to be blind to miss it, so I went back to the Tools screen in the fresh toolbar install I had just done in my copy of IE. Here is how that looked:
I also originally saw some third party tools failing to properly report PageRank at all, and reported that in the original November 3rd edition of this post, but I now see that other tools still report it (and you will see people commenting on that below). In Chrome, for example, the PageRank Status plugin from ChromeFans.org is working just fine. In all honesty, I use PageRank so little that it took me a while to figure that out!
Still, it’s interesting that the new installs of the traditional toolbar, even for IE, has lost the option of showing PageRank. Google has long wanted publishers to focus on alternatives to PageRank. How long before we see a Google published PageRank dropped altogether?
