Google removes the PageRank display: what are the alternatives?

Anyone nostalgic for the Google toolbar that displayed the PageRank — a score ranging from N/A (not available) to 10 used to assess the importance of a page on Google — can rest easy. The confirmation that PageRank is being removed from the Toolbar is a “non-event” in itself (for SEOs at least). From now on, Toolbar users will see a “No PR information avalaible” message with a gray bar in place of the traditional green bar.

PageRank display disappearing from the Toolbar (source: http://www.thesempost.com/google-removing-pagerank-from-toolbar/)

It’s true that the PageRank score shown on the Toolbar, offering a heavily simplified version of the actual PageRank, hadn’t been updated since December 2013. John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, had even announced in a video posted on October 6, 2014 that the Toolbar PageRank probably wouldn’t be updated in the future.

The confirmation that Google is removing the PageRank display from the Toolbar does, however, have the merit of simplifying certain things. “Removing the Toolbar PageRank avoids confusing users and webmasters about the importance of this metric,” John Mueller recently explained.

🍌 John 🍌 on Twitter That said, PR, which calculates a change in a page’s popularity, isn’t disappearing internally. Although it carries less weight than before, it’s still used in the current algorithm.

Which tools can you use to replace the Toolbar PageRank?

How can you get reliable metrics and estimate the authority of a page or a website? Several companies, having seen the removal of the Toolbar PageRank coming for a long time, have developed their own authority-measurement algorithm with this in mind.

Majestic offers an alternative to the Toolbar PageRank, with:

• Citation Flow (CF): an indicator tied to a page’s popularity. Calculated from the total number of links pointing to a page from a different IP address, Citation Flow reflects the quantity of links more than their quality.
• Trust Flow (TF): Complementary to Citation Flow, it reflects the trust placed in a website or a web page. It’s calculated from a list of sites whose quality and level of trust Majestic has verified in advance.

The vendor Moz, for its part, lets you calculate:

• Domain Authority (DA). Based on more than a dozen parameters such as the quality of a site’s external links, Domain Authority assigns the site a score from 0 to 100.
• Page Authority (PA), for its part, offers the same kind of rating as Domain Authority but for a single page.

Most of the feedback on these tools is very positive.