Has it really been eight months since the last PageRank update?
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here: We’re not talking about “real” PageRank which regularly fluctuates and affects Google rankings, we’re talking about the green bar that comes with the Google toolbar, a score between 0 and 10 which is periodically published or ‘updated’. And it’s now been nearly eight months since the last widely reported update at the beginning of April 2010.
If you have ever heard the business idiom that “Turnover is vanity, but profit is sanity”, in the same vein, it has long been said within the SEO community that “PageRank is vanity, but conversion is sanity”.
As accountants look at turnover for one sign of a healthy business, an SEO looks at PageRank as one factor of a healthy site; Along with many other more important factors, such as building a site which search engines can read, optimising for conversions and generating profit.
In SEO it can be easy to fall into the trap of analysis paralysis, spending too much time on figures and not enough time working out issues with your site and promoting your brand. Concentrating on creating a site which users love, search spiders can access, developing your product or service to be the best it can be, creating PR for your site and striving for good quality, natural links can all be achieved without the need to check any PageRank values.
In fact, as fellow SEO Peter Handley points out it’s arguable whether it would be better if Google switched it off altogether:
Add to this that Google is known to show Toolbar PageRank for sites which have been penalised and can’t even pass any “real” PageRank, that new pages (in the last 8 months now) don’t show a PageRank value and can continue to accrue PageRank over the life of the page, that PageRank passed per single link is diminished by the number of links on a page, and that links on certain areas of pages such as footers and sidebars are known to pass less value than others, it becomes very difficult to establish just how effective a link will be from PageRank alone.
While there is no official statement, there are also rumours that Google may switch off the Toolbar PageRank in the future, as they believe it fuels “manipulative” and ill-advised link building practices.
Whether they do or not, we will continue to consider Toolbar PageRank values for the time being, but as a fleeting measurement with a fistful of salt.
