Google PageRank, which has caused its fair share of excitement, disappointment, worry and FUD over the years, finally seems to be on its way out.
Although Google has been telling people not to treat its public PR scores as an all-important metric for some time, the statistic has now been dropped from the Webmaster Tools.
Personally, I didn’t notice (I haven’t observed PageRank for years) but SEO Round Table and others found a thread on the Webmaster Central forums in which Google employee Susan Moskwa says:
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. :-)
More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here: http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq—crawling—indexing—ranking#pagerank
Will this bother anyone? Possibly, but I think it’s high time everyone moved on from elevating metrics, even Google-created ones.
PageRank is still displayed on the Google toolbar, so it’s perhaps not a completely redundant measure just yet, but it certainly shouldn’t hold any real weight for those serious about SEO and the health of their web site.
Author: Andy Merrett
Andy Merrett is a London-based full-time blogger writing for several Shiny Media technology blogs and various other projects. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.
Personally, I think it’s about time and Google is pushing its message with more and more power with every measure they take:
It’s time people focus on their website’s CONTENT and its QUALITY, not on metrics. Metrics come with quality, not the other way around.
One of the best “smoke and mirror” tricks of all time!
the link that you give isn’t found !
Its is very nice to hear but what about the existing pagerank of existing sites and the new sites.
Andy, thank you for the good post. The reason you didn’t notice PrageRank for a long time is that search engine ranking has taken its place for a long time.
We have been automatically looking for results. PageRank by itself doesn’t help your webpages show up in the SERPs. So, we have to find out what matters to us and everybody else.
We’ve all noticed that quite frequently a page shows up in the SERP for a certain keyword that has got much lower PageRank than other big boys. I think that’s enough for a site. Who needs to have a high PageRank?