I must admit, I’m glad to not have people freaking out all the time once their PageRank updates but there’s a lot of debate out there on whether or not PR is relevant today. Does PR still matter?
Updated 1/18/16 – Everything in this post is still updated and accurate.
If you look at forums and SEO blogs or blogs about blogs, you’ll certainly see comments about PageRank, usually in talk about finding backlinks, or why their “PR5” site is being outranked by PR N/A. You’ll see the same delusional ranting and regurgitating of words that I’ve been seeing for at least the past 5 years.
Self made authorities on the subject talk about PR and how you need to create more content to boost your PageRank but more content has absolutely nothing to do with PR at all. It all comes down to links.
The TRUTH About PageRank and Its’ Importance…or Lack of?
PageRank is usually included in a toolbar, like SEOquake. It was a good indicator of a page’s importance. This was helpful to SEOs because we were able to find higher PR sites and get links on those pages to our sites or client sites. It is something that did, at least indirectly help us with rankings.
A lot of people were analyzing PR in the wrong way though, they would just judge the SERPs and the rankings by who had higher PR. PR was never part of the algorithm itself for ranking though, it wasn’t a ranking factor directly but it did contribute to factors that were important.
Public PageRank Updates DIED on December 6th, 2013.
Well over two years ago, is the last time PR will ever be updated. At least that’s what the SEO news sites tell you, along with SEO bloggers and other people of interest in the industry.
What they FAIL to tell you is that PR certainly is not dead internally, but only to what we can see. It’s almost like TrustRank. TrustRank has existed, but we can’t see it. This is probably difficult to come to terms with if you’re an atheist, but this is definitely something we no longer see, but we know is there. 🙂
The same people that are saying how unimportant page rank is, are the people that are pushing the importance of domain authority and page authority. DA and PA are not created by Google, it is just Moz’s attempt at reverse engineering the PR Algorithm in attempt to still get a roundabout idea on what the importance of a page is.
To summarize… People say PR doesn’t matter anymore, but the non-Google created Domain Authority and Page Authority DO matter, which is just an attempt to judge what the PageRank of a site would be using different scoring methods.
So does PageRank still matter? I say yes. Does it still matter as a metric we use to judge sources of backlinks and importance of a page? No. It hasn’t been updated to where we can see current PR in over two years, so using it as a metric now, is a bad idea. In fact, using it as a previous metric wasn’t a very good idea either because the public PR update would be months and months old, it was never current. Google itself, sees the current results, but not us, and that has always been the case.
PageRank matters… but not the PR that was updated in December of 2013… The PR that exists internally at Google.
So How Do I Get Higher Page Rank?
Well you have to realize that you have no metric available to you to really gauge your PageRank except Domain Authority and Page Authority. The problem is that Moz doesn’t have even a small percentage of the data that Google has, and until they have larger data sets and a clone of Larry Page, I don’t think it’s going to be nearly an accurate depiction of what Google wants.
DA and PA though, may be the next best thing when it comes to trying to emulate PR, which is the reason for people vouching for it so much. Saying it is a part of the ranking factor is untrue though, so those local search round ups you see that are saying how important DA and PA are to rankings are misinformed. Correlation is not causation. Say it with me now… correlation is not causation.
In fact, a new friend and reader of this blog was talking about how important he thinks Domain Authority or Page Authority is when it comes to ranking. I spammed his skype with “correlation is not causation”. After being a little obnoxious, I decided to show him the SERPs and had him check DA and PA on sites ranking on the 3rd and 4th page… many of them had higher DA and PA than the top 3 results.
PR is not indicative of where you should be ranked. The same applies for domain authority and page authority.
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What Now?
While PageRank is still important even though we can’t see any current updates on our end, you have to wonder if it’s really a good way to spend your time focusing on PR sculpting or building backlinks for the purpose of manipulating PageRank. I still think basic PR sculpting makes sense, like nofollow your contact page, privacy page, terms and conditions pages, comments, etc. Building backlinks to manipulate PR though I think is likely to be a thing of the past, but backlink providers don’t want you to know that!
That doesn’t mean to stop building backlinks. You can certainly use Domain Authority and Page Authority to judge a page’s value for link building purposes, it just may be as close as we can get when it comes to using it as a metric.
What matters to the client is: is the phone ringing with customers 🙂 Getting the customer’s phone to ring is what I focus on.
Very true.
This article was very well written and I love the structure of your content. Very user friendly, and very engaging!
Thanks for sharing your ideas here. It’s a really nice post though. For us, we really think pagerank is still on top of the priority list when it comes to progress and website development. According to this article [link removed], it really plays a great role in your website success. Do you agree with it, too?
Jack, I assume you didn’t really read the post and you’re just attempting to build links. PR is an outdated public metric, you can’t gauge whether or not the toolbar pr is accurate since it hasn’t been updated in 2014 at all and likely won’t be updated in 2015. If it is on top of your priority list in SEO, then you’re wasting time. You mention it’s on top of your priority list “when it comes to progress and website development” but that makes no sense, as that was NEVER the purpose of PageRank and could not be influenced by the design of your site.
So, we will never see what our Pagerank is publicly, or know when updates are coming again on our side, but Google people will? Should we still try to get .gov or .edu backlinks? Not paying, of course, but is it still just as essential?
Lisa, that’s a good question. I could probably make an additional post talking about .edu and .gov domains because there’s a lot of confusing, and conflicting information out there. PageRank still exists, but what might show as a PR5 site right now, could very well be a PR1 due to outdated information showing publicly.
Ahhhh relief! I’ve been debating this issue for a while now and it’s good to see I’m not going crazy.
Definitely not going crazy Ryan. Thanks for the comment. By the way, I like your business name. Orange Hat Marketing… sounds cool.
what are you know, when google pagerank really be update…
It was discontinued. Won’t update again, according to Google.
oghh, thank for your answer
Okay,If i have a website with good PA and DA and a PR of 1 does google gives more preference to my website in rankings?
PR hasn’t been updated since 2013 and hasn’t really been an indicator of where you rank. PA and DA have nothing to do with Google, and there is very little correlation in rankings. For example, you’ll find sites with higher DA and PA on page 3 of the results. Not a good signal in my opinion.
Sorry if this is a really stupid question, but… back when PR was updated, if someone had a problem with their PR being incorrect or even taken away, they could request for their PR to be looked at individually, between updates. Now the updates are gone, is there still a way to request a PR if you never had one, or query your final PR? I have a PR3 blog and a blog which started after the last update so has no PR at all. Is there any way of requesting a PR for the blog which was never assessed? As sad as it is, a lot of brands that work with bloggers, still judge on PR.
Emma, there is no way to request a public PR for the blog, since public updates of the PR algorithm have been discontinued. It still exists internally but there’s no way for us to know what that is. DA and PA are just attempts to mimic PR. What PR was back in 2013, can be very different today, it’s unfortunate that brands are still using PR to gauge value in working with a blogger. There are much more valuable metrics they can look at instead.
thanks for its news, may be useful for everyone.
I have always wondered in PR still holds up to being an important metric anymore. I recently got a backlink from an .EDU PA 48 DA 82 domain and it also has a page rank of 3 on the page im linked on, and a home page PR 7. Hopefully Ill see some good juice from it.
Do you think your personal website’s DA and PA increases by getting linked to other high PA and DA sites?
Hey John! Thanks for the comment. You’ll see an increase in DA and PA for sure, but the PR3 doesn’t matter anymore, what we see as the PR is not anywhere close to being current. Also, keep in mind that PA and DA are just a third party term not considered by Google, at best it is just a metric we can use to try to gauge the strength of a link(s) in place of PR.
Thanks for the response,
Im aware that the PA and DA metrics are by Moz and not Google though it seems that the whole SEO community keeps a frenzy about those metrics, too. It’s crazy to see the number of people still selling links because of their PR when in reality PR may mean nothing now. Im pretty excited about the EDU link I got though, I hope to see some link flex from it 🙂
Thanks for the article,
John
Hey John, that’s why I always say that I feel sorry for people starting to get into SEO. There’s so much conflicting information out there and a lot of people that are stuck in the mid to late 2000’s. People will continue to sell “high PR” links as long as others keep buying them! lol. I’m sure you’ll see some benefit from the link!
Great article, I really like your writing style. Anyway all the tips are helpful and pretty clear, it could be more specific about domain age, even though it is a factor nobody can speed up (your services doesn’t include some kind of “domain age time machine”, doesn’t them?). 🙂
I have best experience with monthly checking spammy backlinks, it could boost domain authority significantly, mainly in competition which use a spammy methods.
then can we make backlinks with low pr or n/a pr sites with high traffic?
Yes absolutely. Even toolbar PR isn’t updated anymore. Just remember this, if a backlink can bring you traffic, then get the backlink. Nothing else to think about!
Thank you, great article.
Thanks for the comment Fabrizio!
I have read your article, and i think it holds a lot of value. But what do you look for in a good backlink? Like when you are buying an expired domain. Where do you look at to determine if an expired domain is good quality, if it not DA and PA. I am curious about this.
If we’re talking about domains for a PBN, then that’s a different story than gauging the value of a regular link. I think the main point is that instead of looking at metrics and placing all your time on DA/PA, focus on generating links that can actually generate traffic for you.