You’re probably reading this because one of the questions you’re asking yourself is “What is the purpose of PageRank?”
The answer is actually quite simple, but the relevance and important of PageRank in today’s context can be a little confusing.
What Google Says?
First, lets look at what Google says about PageRank :
“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
For the most part, the above quote is true, except for this line “Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. “
In the past Google used to update PageRanks every 3-4 months, and as I write this article, it hasn’t been updated for 9 months now.
Why?
Google’s Internal PageRank.
“Google’s Internal PageRank”
Google has been keeping an internal Page Rank of pages, which is kept away from the publics eye
s. There is a difference between the public PageRank and Google’s internal PageRank. The Public PageRank hasn’t been updated for 8-9 month now, and the internal PageRank which only Google sees, has been continually updated. Leading many to believe that Google is phasing out the public PageRank.
Summary
So if you are chasing the PageRank to increase your listings in the SERPs, and you are using the public PageRank as a metric to check your success – don’t, its futile.
When SEO’ing your site, don’t focus on finding ways to increase your PageRank, concentrate on content, page structure, site structure, and link strategy to name a few.