It has been some time now since Google in December of 2013, moved away from PR or PageRank as an identifiable SEO metric.
You may have heard people say, “PR is not important for ranking anymore” or “Google don’t see PR as important for you to rank” and have probably been wondering, is PageRank still important and if it is how do we find out what our site’s PR is.
PageRank Is Far From Dead
The answer to this question is multifaceted.
To begin with, Google used to update PR every 3 to 4 months via what was called “Toolbar PR”. This gained its name from various toolbar add-ons that picked it up and displayed a sites PageRank. So toolbar PR is no longer being updated by Google and many have wrongly interpreted this to mean Google no longer values the metric when determining the overall value of where one’s website fits into the pecking order when it comes time to place it in the search results.
So What Is PageRank Exactly?
The second part of answering this question needs to cover what PR is and how it is calculated. PageRank is one of the methods used by Google to determine the page’s relevance or importance when it comes to search engine results.
PageRank, named after Larry Page, one of the Google founders, represents the page rank of a page on a website. The system ranks sites from 0 – 10, with a site like Google or Youtube being a 10 and a brand new website with no one linking to it, a zero.
When it comes to raising a website’s PR one needs to be gaining links or backlinks from a site with a high PR, for example, a PR6 or PR7. Some of the web authority is transferred to a site by the calculations checking what other higher authority sites are linking to it. This has been a way in the past for SEO practitioners to manipulate a site’s ability to rank, so when these numbers began to be outdated, it made it more difficult to find the value of a linking partner.
There are new metrics in place DA or Domain Authority and TF, Trust Flow and Citation Flow CF that have essentially replaced the old gauge of PR. This is just not the same as Google not using PR anymore. It is just that they have removed this metric from the public eye.
Your website still has a PR and so do all your internal pages, it is just that you don’t know what this is anymore.
New Ways Of Discovering Your Page Rank [sic]
With the new ways of calculating the value or authority of a website working just as well, Google has not been able to kill SEO just yet. PR is now out of sight but is still alive and very important when it comes to the search results and where you fit in. SEO is not dead, just more difficult to do than once it used to be. You only need to take a close look at the knowable metrics behind top ranking websites today, to understand what this exactly means.
If you are in need of an SEO expert to independently look at your site or your competitor’s site(s), then it may be time we spoke. With the right tools and understanding the whole process of what is working today and is going to continue to work with SEO, formulating an effective SEO strategy is still the best way to be getting your message out there, to your target audience.
