Author // Mike Kalil
It appears as though a Google PageRank toolbar update is underway as I write this. For those who don’t know, PageRank is the method by which Google decides the importance of websites. Every site on the web is awarded a rating of between 0 and 10. Only a handful of sites are awarded a 10; Google.com, Facebook.com, CNN.com and WhiteHouse.gov are among them.
SEOs track PageRank using a FireFox or Chrome plugin that displays a little green bar in their browsers. In the past, the public display has been updated about once a quarter, but this is the first update since April 2010. Many SEOs take this as an indicator of PageRank being phases out. And Google itself stresses that PageRank is only one of a plethora of factors that affect how well a site ranks.
Since the toolbar is only updated occasionally, the data available to the public is historic rather than real-time. A site that’s displaying a PR5 today may, in reality, be a PR4. Google updates the information daily for its own use. So, PageRank is worth noting, but not obsessing over.
Have you noticed any major PageRank changes this morning?
