Webmaster Tools Drops Page Rank

Posted by Grizzly on Oct 15th, 2009 | 112 comments

I have said this for a long time now (a couple of years actually) but PR or page rank is pretty inconsequential when it comes to your site’s ranking for search terms. The vast majority of bloggers and Internet marketers have continued to obsess over their PR however, believing that a high PR will somehow foster better rankings for their sites and pages. Not so and at one point my PR zero site ranked number 1 for one of the most competitive terms online. This did little to convince some of my readers that what I was telling them was true, rather they chose to believe that it must have been a glitch in the system or I had pulled some kind of sneaky “fast one”.

Well, for those of you who use webmaster tools you will now notice that Google has removed the Page Rank data from the Crawl Stats .

These stats used to show under "Crawl Stats" in Webmaster Tools

The Reason?

Susan Moskwa, a Google employee stated the following in Webmaster Central in reply to someone questioning the missing data;

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.

This doesn’t mean that PR no longer exists – it does – it just means that G is trying to get webmasters to quit focusing on its relevance. (and quit trying to game the system in order to inflate their PR perhaps) The irony is that they haven’t removed it from the toolbar though. Strange given the reasoning – far more people use and see the toolbar than use webmaster tools. It should be removed from the toolbar too – but G won’t. The toolbar is their Brand and the home office knows that removing the PR from the toolbar will lead people to remove the toolbar which is removing Google from a lot of browsers…

Just thought you might like to reconsider your reliance on Page Rank – it really is a minor factor in serp rankings.

Cheers

Griz