For years, webmasters spent a considerable amount of time looking at the green indicator on their web browser’s toolbar. This green indicator used to show a web page’s ranking, on a scale of 0 to 10, called PageRank. Google used to refresh and release PageRank data every quarter or so, which was then used by webmasters to judge the performance of web pages and prepare their action plan. Since 2013, however, there has not been any public PageRank update. The reason being given for this is that the pipeline that pushed PageRank data from Google servers to the toolbar broke, and there is no intent to fix the pipeline in the near future.
So, what does this mean for websites? Has Google stopped giving importance to PageRank or is there a reason to prevent PageRank information getting passed on to webmasters? Is PageRank dead? While there is no official explanation or comment from Google on these questions, we can find the answers by tracking how PageRank has evolved over the years and its relevance in determining the value of a web page.
What is PageRank? How is it Calculated?
PageRank is an algorithm named after Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. It was the very first algorithm used by Google for ranking web pages.
In its most simple form, PageRank is a measure of importance of a web page, based on the relative importance of other web pages linking to it. Each link pointing to a web page is considered a vote for it. Each vote, or link, is assigned some weight, based on the quality and importance of the web page sending the link. The algorithm is based on the assumption that more important websites will receive more links from other websites. Theoretically, this is a very strong model for assessing the importance of web pages; however, it has several loopholes, which have been exploited for commercial benefits by SEO service providers and webmasters.
The Business of PageRank
Google, which controls over three-fourths of the search market, is a very powerful medium for people wanting to bring traffic to their websites. Thus, it becomes very important for websites to rank higher in its search results.
For a very long time, PageRank remained among most important factors in deciding the ranking of a page in the search results. Google used to show PageRank as one of the metrics in Webmaster Tools for webmasters to track their performance. Since the PageRank of each web page was publicly available and search engine experts and webmasters knew the basics of the algorithm, a wave of exploiting this information was triggered towards the middle of the last decade. The demand for links started going up and webmasters who could give links started demanding money for it. Link farms came into existence, whose core business was just to sell links. While Google always discouraged paying or receiving money for links, it couldn’t prevent people from the link buying and selling business because of the strong obsession for higher PageRank and its associated commercial benefits.
These practices were defeating the core purpose of PageRank – ranking high quality sites higher in search results.
Bringing Down the Importance
While Google couldn’t control the practice of manipulating PageRank, it started lowering PageRank’s importance, at least in perception, in various ways, such as:
- The PageRank indicator was removed from Webmaster Tools, giving a clear signal to webmasters to reduce attention from PageRank as a metric.
- Web pages with zero or no PageRank started faring better in search results than those with higher PageRank.
- Google, through its key people such Matt Cutts, promoted the thought that it is not a significant metric to track.
- The updates to PageRank, which used to be a regular quarterly exercise, became irregular and now has not been updated for over two years.
Is PageRank really Dead?
Just because Google has stopped publishing PageRank updates to its toolbar does not mean that PageRank is dead for sure. PageRank will probably continue to be measured by Google internally and will remain one of the factors in deciding the importance of a web page. Incoming links will also continue to play their role in determining the authority of a web page.
The importance of PageRank as a metric, however, will continue to go down as Google introduces new ranking factors in the ever-changing world of online content and business. The importance will also go down because the Internet is becoming more real-time and social, forcing search engines to focus on other signals while serving search results. Signals like the freshness of content, Facebook shares and Twitter mentions are gaining more importance.
The space for that green strip on the Google toolbar, however, will continue to be there. Google doesn’t want webmasters to stop using its toolbar because it sends out important usage data to Google, which helps them refine and strengthen their search results.
While one might say that PageRank isn’t dead; it certainly seems to have been put in a coma and will remain in that state for some time to come.