Google PageRank - From Mystery to History ?

Whether you like it or not, but "PageRank distribution of your webpages" has been permanently removed from your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Along with the recent introduction of Labs in GWT, the option to view PageRank Distribution and Page with highest PageRank under "Crawl Stats" has been removed from GWT.
In the words of Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google.

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. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

Moreover many people have observed that their Google toolbar has also stopped showing the PageRank, rather it is showing N/A (No PageRank information available) for all the webpages/websites. Till now there's no official word from Google on this issue, but again we may get some idea from Susan's next message in the same thread:

Toolbar isn't primarily aimed at site owners who are looking for precise & reliable metrics that they can judge their site by or make decisions by. That's one reason it made sense to remove it from Webmaster Tools, which is designed specifically for site owners in a way that Toolbar is not. Personally I would love to see us remove PR from the Toolbar, but mine is not the only opinion in Google and the folks I have most contact with--site owners--aren't the only users or stakeholders of Toolbar.

Even Matt Cutts has given his opinion against the toolbar PR (way back in 2007):

Personally, I wouldn't mind removing the PageRank in the Google Toolbar or swapping it with some other indicator, but that would be a large undertaking. Maybe that can be a long-term goal for me.

Google PageRank almost always gets a reference when we talk about Websites, SEO and making money/building fame online. For some, it is just an algorithm, for others it's a tool to check the authority or authenticity of a webpage/website and for the rest it is as alien as the 63 moons of Jupiter.

Even if the public PageRank is no more visible to us, but the actual dynamic PageRank is still working and is one of the 200 important criteria which decide the ranking of different webpages in specific Google search results. So keep optimizing your blogs for Search Engines and if you are new to PageRank and SEO, then have a quick look here and here.

Blog Admin : Divya Sai

ProBlogger - Inspiring Others Realize Their Dreams!

Share this

Related Posts