Reports have confirmed that Google has gotten rid of its PageRank feature on Webmaster Tools. It was verified when a user in Google webmaster central asked the following question:
I was doing my daily perusing of our client sites in Webmaster Tools, and I noticed something interesting… The PageRank distribution feature, once found on the crawl stats section under “Diagnostics,” is no longer displayed. Is this a permanent change? Perhaps public PR is finally going to be dumped? What say you?
And this was the answer from Ms. Susan Moskwa, a Google Employee dated October 15, 2009.
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.
Ms. Moskwa also included a link about the details as to why people should not be “obsessed” and depend over PageRank. It is an FAQ link discussing about topics on how Google does website Crawling, indexing and ranking.
Brief history about Google PageRank PR(E)
As someone have putted it, the role of PageRank has been reduced to nothing but a “comfort blanket for SEO Noobs”. PageRank was introduced by Google years ago to measure the relative importance of a website by implementing a link analysis algorithm. From then on, PageRank has been Google’s trademark and people thought , especially new webmasters, that it was the standard of web importance. Their notion: The higher your rank, the more popular your website is.
Thru the years, many webmasters and SEO gurus invested their time and effort to build higher Google rank. The result? It increased rampant spam messages (spamdexing) across forums and the entire cyberworld. Many blog owners would post messages on several forums and other online message boards with links to their site hoping to “fatten” their PRs.
In 2005, Google introduced the rel=”follow” attribute for HTML links and anchor elements to forum webmasters and website owners. As a result, all links and anchor messages were NOT included in the calculation of the website’s PageRank system. Many webmasters’ PR begin to plummet while others have lost even half of their original ranks.
Our take
As a word of advice to new and hopeful webmasters, Google’s PageRank now serve only as an indicator whether the site has problems or not. It should not be considered as a guide nor a standard to check if yours or someone else’s website is performing well.
If you read the FAQ from Google, PR is just 1 of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. So why would you bet your soul on less than 0.5% chance? It isn’t reasonable at all.
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Tags: google, No more Google PageRank, PageRank, Susan Moskwa, webmaster toolbar
