Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Death of Google PageRank

Many advertisers considered Google Pagerank as the most reliable metric to measure a website’s authority, but they would possible need to find another one because we’ve seen the death of Google PageRank today.
The green bar on Google Toolbar was often updated a few times a year and webmasters always expected the next updates to see how their websites are progressing. However, if you are checking the PageRank with any plugin or online tool, you can see that they are showing PageRank: N/A for all websites. My site had a PR2 yesterday but now it has gone to N/A, I tried with the most popular websites like Facebook or YouTube and the results are still the same.

Why PageRank Should be Killed

There were some opinions saying that this is just temporary, Google is maybe updating PageRank again or stopped displaying PageRank to make a condolence to Steve Jobs’ death but I don’t think so. This is a suitable time to get rid of PageRank as its role is not as important as before. It has become an outdated metric due to the long period updates, last year witnessed the longest interval of over 9 months and advertisers shouldn’t believe in the metric anymore.
google-pagerank-logo
Moreover, as the ranking is influenced by incoming links and some other criteria, many webmasters are manipulating it using frowned-upon techniques like buying links or link-based advertisements from higher PR sites. This has led to the distort in the natural balance of the web and affected Google’s search result pages.

Your Thoughts

I myself had a few PR2 and PR3 websites but I totally agree with Google in this decision. It’s time for advertisers to look at more accurate metrics like Google Analytics’ stats like visit, conversion rate or return of investment. What do you think about the change? Will you be worried if Google really stopped showing PageRank?
Update: It seems like Pagerank isn’t disabled. Google updated the URL which is used to query the PR and it caused all plugins, toolbars and websites to stop reporting the number. Go to the site PageRank Updates to check your PageRank, it has been updated with new script to display PR properly.

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