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Is Google Page Rank Relevant?

Saturday, 27 February 2010 00:45 Michelle Crossley blog - SEO and internet marketing

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Google Page Rank (PR) is a number from 0 to 10, which Google assigns to each web page on the internet. It is based on how "powerful" that page is in terms of the number and quality of links coming into the page. To find the PR for your website, you need to refer to the Google browser toolbar. Earlier, PR had resulted in a near obsession for most SEOs across the world for higher PR sites.

And then, on October 14, 2009, Google employee Susan Moskwa confirmed that the company had removed PageRank from its Webmaster Tools section.

Her post (in part) stated, “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.” PageRank was still displayed on the Google Toolbar web appliance two days after Moskwa’s confirmation. All rumor and suspicion that Google no longer used PR has been confirmed. In fact, Google has moved to TrustRank, which is newer version of PR. However, TrustRank is not available publicly.

Here are the top 5 reasons why Google PR is irrelevant today:

Google has confirmed that PR is not important. Isn’t that reason enough? For more details, you can refer to the Google Webmaster Central website. Also, you can read the following FAQ, available on the Google Webmaster Forum Help site to clear all your Google PR-related doubts:

Q: My site's PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. If you're looking for metrics, we'd encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.
You cannot track PR: The PR displayed on the tool bar is 6-9 months old and it cannot be confirmed as accurate too.
PR does not remain the same throughout the website: Since every individual page retrieves its own PR, it changes for every page on your website. If the homepage of your webpage is a PR 8, the related page may be a PR 4.
PR is not related to SEO or organic search: It is pretty obvious that the Google PR is not related to SEO or the organic results on search engines. There are a number of websites, which have a PR of 0, yet rank very well on the major search engines.
PR and social media: Ever wondered how your tweets rank on Google PR? Social media conversations are dominating search results, even if their PR is 0. Same applies to press releases and content related to businesses.