The end of Pagerank? Google removes PR from Webmaster Tools

Thu 15 October 2009 16:44, Bas van den Beld

Pagerank has been a point of discussion throughout the years. It must be clear for many now that Pagerank doesn't really matter when it comes to ranking. Still many feel it is an important aspect in measuring the strength of your website.

Google has for a long time told webmasters not to take Pagerank to seriously. And it could well be that Google will be removing Pagerank all together in the (near?) future. Today Search Engine Roundtable noticed Google removed the PageRank section in the crawl statistics in Google Webmaster Tools. Is this the first step to removing Pagerank all together?

SER talked to Google Susan Moskwa who said:

"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. :-)"

Google apparently already removed it earlier this week when it released new Webmaster Tools Labs features.

It's a small step for Google, but it might me a step which leads to bigger steps. If they don't want site owners to think its so important the logical next step would be to remove Pagerank from the toolbar and other areas all together. But will they do that…?

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Comments (3)

- Barry Adams
- [website]
I think PageRank will always have an internal function in Google's search algorithms. It's just becoming less important, and Google wants us to know that (or at least wants us to think that it's less important).

Do 15 okt 2009, 17:01
- Nik
Quite why folks put some much store in an overly simplified 1-10 scale was always a mystery to me. No doubt the internal structure will remain behind the scenes to aide the algorithm, but the physical representation has been redundant for some time in truth.

Do 15 okt 2009, 17:11
- Dennis Sievers
- [website]
I agree with Barry. It will always be part of Google. And focus on PR is already shifting. Its like the Alexa rank, you know its not accurate and can't be trusted, but its nice to see the high numbers ;-)

Vr 16 okt 2009, 09:16

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