Someone asked a question about PageRank in today’s Webmaster Hangout. While we had a surprise PageRank update in 2013, which was a surprise update when Google fixed something else, there hasn’t been any change since then. But people still ask about it.
A couple things to note. Google does use and update PageRank internally for their search rankings. But it is specifically the external PageRank that the public sees that he is discussing.
The specific question was someone complaining they lost PageRank and haven’t seen it update after they switched from HTTP to HTTPS. Mueller replied that it is likely that PageRank won’t ever update again.
So Toolbar is something we haven’t updated in a really long time. So I would expect this to probably never update. That’s not something I would really focus on in a case like this. If you’ve moved to a new site, if you’ve moved to HTTPS, then the PageRank in the toolbar probably won’t update there.
This is not at all surprising. Webmasters weren’t even expecting it to update in 2013, as Matt Cutts had been pretty vocal with SEOs about it being broken in the pipeline before that. And John Mueller also said that they didn’t have plans to do updated on it again when asked about it in 2014.
However, there are still webmasters and SEOs who live and die by what that little green bar says, and ask when they can expect it to update, not realizing that it hasn’t been updated externally in so long. So it is worth repeating that if you are still expecting an update, according to John Mueller, it is very unlikely to happen again.
Jennifer Slegg
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