Does Google Still Believe in Pagerank?

One of the factors that used to be the hallmark of Google as the search giant is its flagship concept, the “PageRank”. We can say that the entire world of SEO revolved around the concept of pagerank. Today you do not get to hear about pagerank. One of the questions that haunts the webmasters recently is whether Google still believes in Pagerank. One of the rumours that we keep hearing recently is that Google is going to drop the concept of pagerank. Is this true? Will Google drop one of its key concepts that made the search engine stand distinct from the rest of the search engines?

Let us take a little deeper look at Google’s stand on pagerank. Google says that pagerank is not the end goal but it is just an in-between goal to what Google wants. This is what Google actually says about PR in one of its post in its official blog, Beyond PageRank: Graduating to actionable metrics and this was posted way back in 2011. Despite that, many webmasters have not got the point and they try to propagate their false views and misconceptions.

“the PR you see publicly is different from the number our algorithm actually uses for ranking. Why bother with a number that’s at best three steps removed from your actual goal, when you could instead directly measure what you want to achieve? Finding metrics that are directly related to your business goals allows you to spend your time furthering those goals.”

SEOs observe that Google’s has not updated its pagerank tool bar for the past six months. Google has not made any changes to its pagerank tool bar since early February. This can mean that Google is shifting its focus.

Are you too spending a lot of time in boosting your pagerank and doing things that you think will improve your pagerank? If you are doing this, it is high time that you changed your approach. Pagerank does not reflect your ranking directly any more the close connection that used to exist between pagerank and ranking is not there any longer. Google makes numerous changes to its algorithm constantly every month and this takes Google away from its pagerank concept further and further.

Rather than wasting time on Pagerank and the related issues try to work on things that really matter the most. Today what matters the most to Google are good content and powerful signals from the social media. You focus on these two concepts and everything else that you wanted for your website will automatically follow. Design stringent social media marketing campaigns. Focus on your SMM efforts and keep them clean.

Google has removed pagerank from the webmasters tool way back in 2009. You should be looking for alternatives to boost your page rank. Google visibly discourages webmasters to stop looking at the pagerank. When Google itself is going to underplay one of its distinguishing factors, why should we be bothered about it?

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