Is Google Page Rank dead or alive? A few days ago on September 23, 2007, Google made drastic changes to its PR Ranking System, adjusting sites based upon the "quality" of incoming links. Google has made PR adjustments before, so this is nothing new. The unique fact about this PR adjustment is that the lower PR Ranking seems to have no affect on rankings (not so far). The message this new adjustment is sending to professional SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) like me, is that PR is no longer a standard for judging how a site fares on page one.
Google Page Rank is the numerical ranking given to every page on the web on a 1-10 scale. Websites that are a 10 are considered more important than websites with a PR of one or zero. If you don't know I'm talking about, scan my article written on November 2005 about Google Page Rank.
Jill Whalen of Highrankings.com believes that Google PR is a useless measurement of a site's importance and even advocates removing the toolbar from your browser altogether. Word on the street is that Google has two separate scales for ranking websites, one public and the other private, for their eyes only.
Bob Mutch of SEOCompany.ca explains the difference between at Google Page Rank
RPR stands for "real page ranking."
It doesn't come as a shock to me necessarily, I started noticing some of my sites were losing PageRank, but holding their rankings. I can say, however, that the toolbar is a simplistic, yet powerful visual indicator that's difficult to ignore. The simple visual of that one little toolbar gives a false sense of security to website owners, and this in turn can lead to laziness and copy-cating. In fact, the toolbar may stifle creativity in the sense that people will just try to copy the guy with the most PR, whether or not the site is effective or not. When the importance of a website is less public, it frees the mind to focus on the website at hand without gauging success by the green bars of others.
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It's actually not a word on the street - it's for real. I attended a seminar that Jill put on with Dan Crow, the Crawl Manager from Google. I specifically asked him this question and that was his response - the toolbar is completely worthless. PageRank is an internal algorithm that Google uses (one of many!) to determine importance, but it's not the only thing and it's not at all reflective in the toolbar. In fact, if you look at actual rankings, you will often find that lower PR sites rank higher than those with higher PR - it happens all the time!