Let me start this blog post by making it very clear – Google’s Toolbar PageRank (as opposed to the “real” PageRank measures that we never see) is just about a complete non measure in SEO terms (which I mentioned a year ago when I wrote a post about 5 ways to make your SEO Agency even happier).
Basically its a visible measure of a websites link authority, scored from 0-10, and illustrates essentially how important a web page is perceived as being by Google. However, it’s well known for being somewhat inaccurate when its updated, and in many respects (i.e. comparing why one page outranks another), seems to have no influence on whether or not a web page ranks (independently of other factors).
It seemed that a couple of years ago, Google was making efforts to make Toolbar PageRank updates more frequent, but in early 2010 this stopped – the last update of any real note was April 2010, 9 months ago!
So – why is this a problem?
In short – because it’s the only real visible measure of a webpages link popularity without cracking out the analysis tools. It doesn’t mean that those who know well enough “take” anything from it – or if they do, they know specifically what they are looking to get from it.
For example, I have in the past, when this was being frequently updated, found internal pages of a site mysteriously have all their Toolbar PageRank vanish – and upon further investigations it was clear that someone had ripped this pages content and were managing to outrank us for that content, despite us being the original source. Of course there are other ways that I would find this out now – but it was a trigger at the time to make me investigate further.
Trying to do something like that using Toolbar PageRank now would be impossible – as its not been updated for 9 months, so even if something like that caused an issue 6 months ago, it wouldn’t be possible to tell.
Despite that example – most SEOs that I speak to would not be unhappy to see Toolbar PageRank vanish, like it has done in Google Webmaster Tools. Google at the moment by retaining this as a visible measure are sending mixed signals – in areas that matter, and by not updating it, they are telling webmasters that it is not important – but by continuing to retain out of date information in a prominently visible location with their toolbar, it maintains this confusion.
Many outdated link builders – those that are still sending out masses of the same emails in the hope of getting links back are still talking about the PageRank of the pages they offer links from – there is a whole link economy that was initially founded on these scores.
This is likely why it’s not being updated – Google knows that the link world is an economy in its own right, out to “game” its algorithm, and it’s likely that this is precisely why they are loath to update it.
The final point – those that don’t know any better – like new clients before you educate them properly, or those that don’t listen when you attempt to educate – still want to see this number increase for their sites. I’ll admit it, I have a couple of sites, I would like to see this figure increase for, even though I realise in isolation it means nothing.
But when you are asked “what are we going to do to increase the PageRank of the website” by those that are not well informed on the topic again and again, and all you can say is “Google haven’t updated it for 9 months”, conversations can become difficult.
The right answer to that question, is that the “real” PageRank is something that you are looking to build upon, but that it’s important to focus on the right goals for the campaign – driving the right ranking improvements, that in turn will drive relevant traffic to the website and drive the conversions needed to grow that websites business.
As I mentioned in a blog series last year, SEO’s are measured on a vast number of Key Performance Indicators, but at the end of the day – the goal that really matters is making money from a site not improving a PageRank figure.
So please Google, can you please update these figures? Or even better yet, can you remove them altogether? Thanks!
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Great Post Pete, personally I dont see much point of toolbar pagerank these days as it does not tell people anything about their website.
Its out of date, has nothing to do with how a website ranks and it seems to be totally flawed in a seance that it allows webmasters go out and replicate their pagerank 4 website by getting the same links.
Personally I think the best metrics to look at when judging a website are:
How well it ranks
How good the content is
Where their links come from
All pagerank does at this time is increase webspam.
Cheers Scott.
Completely agree (hence my rant!)
I think that retaining it at the moment is just another part of the whole layer of misinformation around the SEO sphere at the moment – it benefits nobody!
I’d much rather see it go than be updated, but would rather see it updated than continue to be stupidly out of date!
Toolbar PageRank will always be at least 3 months out of date – thats the way its always been. I would love to see the real PageRank value – even if its only displayed in webmaster tools as I feel that Googles value may give us a lot more information about our websites overall.
The only problem is Google will never show us this information as it will allow us to replicate the true PageRank value and in time their algo.
Sadly, I very much doubt that we will ever see the “true” PageRank value – I’d love to know it, but I just can’t see Google giving up that secret, for the very reasons you have mentioned here.
If you follow the PR of enough domains then you will see that toolbar PR updates are happening regularly, but just not at the global “all at once” level.
We monitor a very large number of sites that we own (almost 1000) and we’ve seen Toolbar PR updates occur regularly the last 6 months or so, most recently 3 domains changed their PR value two days ago (2 up, 1 down).
Interesting – I am regularly keeping an eye on over 100 different URLs and the only changes in the last 9 months are ones that have been redirected from one URL to another – other than that – i.e. for any new website that has launched since April 2010, on the ones I am tracking, I haven’t seen anything change at all.
I think that there have been some updates for those passing through a redirect, but a “full” PR update on what I have been tracking has not been seen for a considerable time
The changes I am logging are not redirect related, just plain old PR changes on existing websites.
Here’s another report from someone on a recent PR update on their site: http://forums.seochat.com/google-page-rank-47/yet-another-pr-update-thread-387399.html
Thanks for sharing this, I will have to investigate a little further it seems!
There are a lot of pagerank changes happening today, definitely the most updates I’ve seen in one day for several months.
cool, I will take a look shortly and see if any of the ones I am tracking are seeing any movements! Thanks for the heads up