I am assuming everybody reading this post already knows what PR (Google Page Rank) is and what it means to all of us. In fact most of us are (if not all) eagerly awaiting the long due Google’s Next PR Update.
End Of Google Page Rank System

For years SEO and Webmasters have constantly starred at the Google PR Tools every 3 months hoping some good news every time. Have we ever wondered? What if Google sacks the Page Rank system?

OR let me rephrase it in a more horrifying way..

What if Google calculates and utilizes Page Rank system internally for evaluations but stops displaying it publicly?

First of all I would like to apply my most trusted problem solving technique “Reverse Engineering” – why did Google actually made this piece of information public when they are known for keeping everything hidden (they obviously have to) and when they could easily keep it a secret for all these years. I think it was more of a branding gimmick to capture authority and posting an edge over industry competition by plotting an unparalleled parameter which eventually opened the Pandora’s Box for them.

Link building (Prohibited as per Google) is entirely based on the Page Rank parameter. Ask any link seller and they will quote a price per link on the basis of webpage PR where the link will be placed.

500 PR 1 Links – $500 | 250 PR2 Link – $500 | 150 PR3 Links – $500 | 75 PR4 Links – $500 | 25 PR5 Link – $500 | 10 PR6 Links – $500 | 5 PR7 Links – $500 | 3 PR8 Link – $500 | 1 PR 9 Link for….

We all know (or got involved) into extravagant shopping or creation of bulk .edu or .gov back links for the PR they attain. Otherwise I don’t see a reason why would anybody go and create a link on a disaster management government website pointing towards an ice cream parlor website. I get amused when some black hats explain to me how they generated links from a PR 9 HP.com sub-domain to a key maker’s website and achieved huge ranking boosts. Is that PR 9 not being the centrifugal force for black hats to evolve such methods to grab those links by hook or by crook?

Check out any good SEO company’s Weekly/Monthly Off Page reports and you will find beautiful templates but none of them will be complete without a highlighted column called PAGE RANK.

Let’s take up an example of Social Bookmarking with which simple browser bookmarking went social. It was a nice concept and worked well. Top websites reached high PR very soon and then came the SEO storm of bombarding popular SB sites with all possible Web Pages (not websites). A profile having no friends starting sharing more than 100 pages but with whom? Themselves? Not just this – “Can you name few top Social Bookmarking websites?” became a popular question during SEO interviews.

Blog Comments – If you own a blog with some PR, you need to keep an assistant (VA sounds better no?) to filter out good comments out of the 100’s of them being posted each day. What for? Because every comment poster needs his/her share out of my hard earned Page Rank.

Then there exists something called Fake PR as well to add more spam. Websites holding high Fake PR are sold at very high stakes. With the next PR update the fake PR is going to vanish and the uninformed buyer is simply robbed.

To curb all this menace, Google has recently enforced significant measures (Penguin) to divert if not dilute the importance of Page Rank in Google SERP. I feel they still pass enormous importance to PR in rankings but embedded another major factor “Relevancy” which negates the value of irrelevant high PR back links.

Author:

Kapil Khaneja
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