Google’s Pagerank is Dead

If you believe in Google PageRank you may as well believe in the Tooth Fairy. Now this can be a real bummer for people who trusted and believed in it for so long. I’ve known it was useless for a number of years but still found myself checking it occasionally purely out of habit. Visualize the “I could have had a V8!” clunk to my forehead that followed. I knew better but as the old saying goes … old habits die hard.

If you do a Google search for information on PageRank, you’ll find a number of links, but take a look at the article dates. Those pointing to information that sung PageRank’s glory are all old and outdated. There were even books written devoted to PageRank. One the comes to mind called “Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings” can still be found for sale over at Amazon and I’d imagine other booksellers and other books as well. I gave up books for search engine optimization long ago because I found that SEO changes to rapidly that it didn’t pay to spend money on books that would only be outdated in short order. I found much  more current and useful information on good SEO web sites and forums. It was a waste of my money to keep collecting SEO books.

An Ineffective Tool

PageRank actually quit working properly several years ago. Warnings went out that it wasn’t reliable but there were still millions of people who weren’t aware of this and probably just as many that were but apparently didn’t believe it and continued to hold tight to their belief in it. The push was on to get your PageRank up and people from all corners of the Earth scrambled to do just that. I admit that I can be included in this group and I pushed myself to the edge not only for me, but for all my clients as well. It was the thing to do, after all. The guilt an SEO specialist felt if they couldn’t get their client’s page rank up, was overwhelming! If you know anything at all about SEO, you knew or should have known, that PageRank was just one single tool amongst hundreds in the Google toolbox anyway.

Point blank, Page Rank is useless and that’s according to Google themselves. It still exists in the Google Toolbar, but that’s only because Google feels it’s part of their branding. You can read more about this over at Web Pro News where there’s an entire article devoted to it entitled “Google Ditches Page Rank in Webmaster Tools” and another article was recently published over at Straight Up Search entitled “Why Google Pulled PageRank from Webmaster Tools.”

I really wish they’d either fix it or remove it because it not only gives people the wrong impression, but when something’s broke, doesn’t it make more sense to either repair it or remove it? I’m a web designer, when something on a web site I’ve developed is broken, I fix it or remove it. It just doesn’t look good to have broken goods on a web site. Google’s logic in this baffles me, but it’s not my job to try to figure out why they do or don’t do something.

You can continue to believe in it if you want to but it’s a waste of your time and energy to do so. Just like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, some things are hard to let go of but if you’re amongst the believers in PageRank, it’s really in your best interest to abandon those beliefs. Why not put your efforts into doing what’s needed to help your site gain good rankings and more importantly a good return on your investment (ROI)?