Google PageRank Will Likely Not Update Again

For several years we’ve been hearing about the death of PageRank from Google. Long before Matt Cutts left on leave he was saying that he doesn’t anticipate PageRank being updated again after the surprise update that happened in 2013.

PageRank is long been used as a metric by webmasters, particularly for link building and is a sign of whether or not a website might be penalized by Google or not. But with a year or more going between updates, it hasn’t been that important for quite some time.

John Mueller on the webmaster help forums posted that he doesn’t anticipate PageRank being updated again.

I wouldn’t use PageRank or links as a metric. We’ve last updated PageRank more than a year ago (as far as I recall) and have no plans to do further updates. Think about what you want users to do on your site, and consider an appropriate metric for that. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2011/06/beyond-pagerank-graduating-to.html

It is important to note, however, that PageRank does continue to be updated internally within Google. So measurement of PageRank is not entirely dead, but it is dead from the perspective of visibility to anyone outside of Google.

It won’t stop some webmaster’s hyper focus on PageRank and it’s role in SEO.  However, when top SEOs have been declaring PageRank as dead, it is definitely time to look at other more valuable metrics in determining whether a site has value or not and what its links are worth.

Yes, there’s always the possibility we could see an update at some point. The surprise update we saw last year was simply result of Google fixing something else and a side effect of that was the PageRank refresh, much to the glee of some webmasters. But I wouldn’t put any weight on there being another update publicly, and less it is another one of those surprise updates.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post

Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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