They are only removing it from Webmaster Tools, not the tool bar. Hopefully they get rid of it completely at some point. It's such a horrible metric in determining any sort of value for a website. A post on SEOMoz today actually explains it well: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-algorithm-pretty-charts-math-stuff "Google's PageRank score was (around February of 2009) approximately 16% better than random guessing for predicting ranking page (N+10 aka ranking page 1 vs. page 2) and less than 5% better than random guessing for predicting ranking position (N+1 aka ranking position 1 vs position 2)"
That post just gives me a headache. I'm pretty sure at this point even Google is confused by their own PageRank algorithm.
Awesome article, thanks for sharing I still like pagerank though just because I like to see a sign of progress when building backlinks
Google want people to stop thinking of it as a ranking factor. For a long time PageRank has been a poor indicator of site authority - the number shown was always meant to be way behind the 'real' PageRank that Google actually used! It does raise the question though - what *are* we meant to use to gauge site authority?!
Pagerank smagerank. I'd prefer having a top 3 serp site than a PR9 site. Sheesh. @Panda: A site's Authority is determined IMO by: a) age of site, b) # of quality inbound links, c) # of unique daily visitors, d) #of unique pageviews
@SCLocal - agreed about good rankings being more important than PR Re. c) & d) - do you think Google uses Analytics data when it comes to rankings? I've always wondered because they certainly have access to that data, so why not use it? I think on-site content and internal links are also really important - that's why Wikipedia ranks for everything.
I doubt it is going away and it is honestly not something I really even concern myself with. As SCLocal said, I would much rather be in the top 3 in the serps then have a high pr with crappy serps.
my all websites has no see improve and i didn't see movement pr updation. anyway if you feel than it may be true.
I most certainly do, every time you click a link after doing a Google search that link is encoded so google knows exactly where it appeared on the page, etc. I'm sure google takes into consideration the position of the link and the amount of clicks to determine if said link is gaining popularity and therefore should be moved up the serps. I ran an interesting test regarding the above statement, what I did was set up 3 machines, 3 separate IPS, and had them all use a 'google' link as the default homepage. Those machines were used everyday and naturally every time the browser was loaded, the 'google link' was used... I have no idea if google believed those 'visits' were a direct result of people searching for the keyword phrase and then taking that into the ranking position, but it did have positive effects for the test site I used. That all being said, I, nor any other non-google employee, can only speculate, of over 200 parts of the ranking algorithm I'm positive this is included within, how much weight it has is another question.
Nice observation!!! Always thought there is some relation about clicks/visits of particular site when results gotten from google SE, but never made such tests. Still believe there's something true about all this... Thanks for sharing, you've got some rep. Cheers
Even Google tells site owners not to use it. Google Employee, Susan Moskwa stated about the removal of PageRank from Webmaster Tools, "We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."
It will hurt those forums who sell links on page rank sites, but page rank is also an important factor in serp.
What factor of PR is important for SERP? Nothing at all. PR is just a hyped up summary of your backlinks. True, backlinks are important for SERPs but the alogrithms for both PR and SERPs are very different. PR was crap, is crap and will always be crap.