In 2014 I wrote about the end of Page Rank … well, make that public page rank. It was the final time Google would update Page Rank in a way that would allow us, the public to know what a site, any site’s page rank was.
That of course didn’t mean Page Rank was dead. In fact it’s the most important part of search engine rankings with Google. The only thing that was going away at that time, was the public’s knowledge of the updates.
Fast forward two years and they’ve finally put the final nail in the coffin. Now not only do they no longer update page rank publicly, they are now resetting all public page ranks from their past records to zero.
For the last two years I could look up the page rank of a site and it would return the page rank as of the last 2014 update. But as of now, that’s no longer the case as every site was set at zero.
If you aren’t familiar with what page rank is, you need to be. Because if you want to improve your SEO you need to understand how important it is to your website.
PageRank is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google.
PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.
The idea is that information on the web could be ordered in a hierarchy by “link popularity”: a page is ranked higher as there are more links to it.
This removal of public PageRank scores isn’t a surprise. Google told us they would be removing PageRank scores from the Google Toolbars last month … and now my friends, it seems to be gone forever.
The problem with this is, Google PageRank is a tool that someone could use to measure the success of their SEO efforts. It was also something you could use to set your advertising rates as well as your resale value of your website. In the past, a PR9 website would be worth WAYYYYYYYYYYYYY more than a PR2 website. Now though, people can’t use that metric to value their website and this makes things a little more complicated when trying to buy and sell websites.
Sure people call still look at things like their MOZ or Alexa rankings but those can be manipulated and aren’t always all that accurate.
It’s for this reason that people are sad to see the end of public PageRank.