Over on the LED-Digest today a post was made about paid links and how the the whole hoopla surrounding them would basically go away if Google just dropped the visible PageRank bar.
Sigh.
The concept of keeping PageRank hidden won’t stop people from buying or selling links. They’ll just come up with a rating system of their own or determine ad rates based on where a page ranks in the search results. You know, kinda like a lot of smart webmasters are doing now…
Maybe we should just make the serps invisible, that will fix things.
I’ll disagree with you here Sapphire, Google’s complaint is about manipulation of their rankings. You don’t have to see PageRank to know a site is worth buying links from. Go ahead, take the toolbar away – it won’t matter one bit to those buying and selling links.
Actually, people sold links before Pagerank existed, and there is nothing unethical about doing so transparently – it’s just a form of advertising. Making pagerank invisible would assure Google that no one is selling links JUST to steal their PR, which is Google’s main complaint.