After reading a few on this threads, I really noticed that a lot of you doesn't know that google has removed PR on their webmaster's tool, google rarely done PR updates this year in which I don't really know the exact date.. PR or Page Rank that we always look upon as our metrics when searching for quality sites to place links has now been devalued by google itself, so my bet is SEO will be harder in the future.. read here for more info.. http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/10/15/google-ditches-pagerank-in-webmaster-tools actually this has been confirmed after Susan Moskwa a Google employee respond over google webmaster help forum. see here. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48&hl=en
now that's some great news ;0 , this will encourage site owners to concentrate on content rather than trading links
well I guess backlinks are still needed to support the site, specially when placed on a website wherein it can generate tons of traffic and also google might be focusing on the relevance of the links or links on authority sites.. this might be their answer for those people bragging about selling links because of PR, and for those spammers who usually take advantage of high PR sites.
Oh people will still trade links. Building links to your site will still be an important part of the SERP's. But as webdev007 points out above, it will be a LOT harder to buy and sell links. This is good news to webmasters who are building legitimate natural links, who won't have to compete so hard against those taking shortcuts.
Google simply stopped showing PR in webmaster tools NOT because they are not considering it in their algo or because they devalued it... They stopped showing it because doing so sent conflicting messages to webmasters. On the one hand, they were telling webmasters don't worry about PR. Write good content that people want to read and you'll eventually (years from now) rank well because other sites will "eventually" start linking to you. On the other hand, they were showing the percentage of pages on your site that had Low, Medium, and High PR scores on the Crawl Statistics page which implied a certain amount of importance. Why else would they show it? They didn't stop using PR. They likely didn't change at ALL how it is used in the ranking algorithm. They simply removed a graph showing the percentage of pages on your site that have Low, Medium, and High PR scores on the Crawl Statistics page. They did this a few weeks ago when the added the Google Labs section with the Malware and What Googlebot Sees pages. Susan Moskawa did absolutely nothing but confirmed the obvious that every moron on the planet could already see for themselves: That Google removed the PR graph from the Crawl Stats screen. She said nothing about Google no longer using PR in their algorithm. She said nothing about them even changing their algorithm to devalue PR. I'm guessing what was done was lost in translation since you and sooooooooooo many here and on other SEO forums do NOT speak/read English as their first language.
Hi janicejan, Pr updates happen every day, its the little green tool bar that people seem to follow that I think you mean?
Actually there are two types of PR - "actual" PR and toolbar PR. Perhaps this post will answer your questions about what page rank is. Actual PR is updated constantly. It's used as a ranking factor for your URLs, but is generally a minor factor these days compared to other things like inbound links. However, you will NEVER know what your "actual" PR value is. Toolbar PR is the little green bar displayed by the Google Toolbar. It's only updated occasionally. It used to be about once per quarter but seems a little more often lately. The toolbar PR is worthless other than to give you a VERY rough estimate of your actual PR. The toolbar PR is ALWAYS out of day (it's weeks old even on the day they publish a toolbar PR update) and is NOT used at all for ranking purposes.
This is really interesting. I just even looking for increasing my SEO strategy to improve my site's PR. This is really very good news. hehe
I don't think Google references Alexa ranking at all? It maybe gives an indication of site popularity but certainly not any formal factor in ranking.
I've always found it odd that they displayed this to us to begin with. I think it will be harder to exploit now; however, there will still be ways of estimating page rank or a links value such as total backlinks. It's only logical that a site with 30,000 backlinks has page rank. It will just be harder to find internal pages that have page rank and then it'll slow down the process by forcing you to check backlink totals. (If you're like me, you don't care about the page rank and just build so it doesn't affect you )
in big business i don`t think closing service is very easy . it may effect their stock in ny stock exchange for few days .
I'm not affected with this news in the first place, I just want to share this to all of you to end your obsession on PR, PR is nothing but google's branding of your site, there are lots of ways or metrics we can do to clarify if the site that we are linking are authority for our domain.. have you noticed that webpages with high PR are spammed or abused by a lot of people? and this for me is google's answer for those spammers.. cheers!