Some bad things come from good ideas. PageRank is one of those bad things that came from a good idea. When the idea of PageRank first showed up it was a promise, a system to score websites and organize them on the google search results page.
What made PageRank so bad? Link spam. PageRank gave birth to the awful website ruining practice of link spam. Under informed and mislead businesses saw PageRank as the holy grail of ways to do well in Google. This lead to people spamming links, over charging, and turning SEO which should have been an art form about optimizing and making life better for visitors into a cheap used car auction.
Thankfully Google was smart enough to see the error of their ways, and have backed off PageRank and are now making it something the public can’t see or access. Here is hoping the obsession with it and people seeing it as the driving force for their SEO dies with it, so we can back to making user driven sites filled with great contact without having PageRank looming over our heads. For a great over view of the history of poor choices leading to the removal of PageRank take a look at the article below.
PageRank — the secret sauce that Google used to become the giant of the search world — is no more. No more for the public, that is. Google’s numeric rating of how important it considers pages to be will soon no longer be accessible to the public. Good riddance. Ever gotten a crappy email asking for links? Blame PageRank. Ever had garbage comments with link drops? Blame PageRank. Ever had to ferret out the how and why you should make use of the nofollow attribute on links ? Blame PageRank.