posted in search engine optimization on 10 October 2010
by Andrew Lang
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Is Google Getting Rid of PageRank?

It's been a good 6 months since the last major PageRank update (early April). July came and went without an update, and now October is showing a conspicuous silence from the Chocolate Factory over at Mountain View.

There's no gifts to bear to those poor new sites stuck on PR0 that've been live for up to 6 months. No PR drops either (apart from dropped domains that change WHOIS info I've seen).

Clearly they don't hold much value for PageRank in 2010, skipping the last 2 scheduled updates. It points to the strong possibility that they will simply make it officially obsolete in the very near future. Actually I think it's even more than simply Google not seeing the public facing PageRank as an irrelevance, they've found it's perverted the way people link.

I guess because link buying and advertising (that's just a euphamism for link buying anyway!) holds a lot of stock in PageRank, and so the public-facing PageRank scoring has heavily influenced where links have been placed over the years.

What If There Was No PageRank?

The whole link buying/selling industry is centred on PageRank - take away PR and suddenly it will be things like Alexa scores being used to determine the value of a site (notice that would be website, not individual page). THAT means a low traffic, high PR site suddenly becomes worthless. Meanwhile a high-traffic, low PR site suddenly gains a lot of value.

Google have their own internal page scoring, no doubt about it - and they will always keep their REAL scoring in a black box, away from any potential SEO reverse-engineering. The public facing PageRank was rather a strange move from Google in the first place. Why would we need to know what Google thinks of the value of each page? Perhaps it will be replaced by something else. Or perhaps there WILL be a PR update eventually - but if so, it will only continue the charade of viewing public-facing PageRank as being anything of value.

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