Rumours are slowly circulating across the web, claiming Google have blocked the ability to see a websites page rank. For UK users,  when you wake up this morning you maybe notice your page rank bar no longer works! It was first reported in the UK at 3am BST. So far we have confirmed people as far as USA and Australia are unable to view stats on there PR bar.

We frequently hear about Google advising SEO’s to to ignore PR, yet millions of SEO’s around the world still use this as a key metric when assessing the quality of a domain.  Page rank is a key factor on the black market of link sales each day.  Millions of pounds are spent each day on the “seo black market”, where companies across the world are trading links for cash, using page rank as a key factor when deciding the value of a link.  Could this latest PR block be an attempt by Google to hinder SEO techniques?  So far Google has not officially commented on this, for now we can only guess it maybe a technical glitch. Should this be here to stay, it will globally change the search industry overnight, the paid links market maybe dead sooner then we thought.

Previously in 2009 Google did suspend the page rank bar yet it was reactivated a few hours later.

We will keep you updated throughout the day with any new developments on this story.  Follow me on Twitter for live updates.