PageRank has long been something to talk about and was at one point important. These days however it seems that Google’s Toolbar page rank is just another statistic that doesn’t really mean anything. This is probably why Goole will be killing it off.

OK, not actually killing it off and removing all support for it etc, but in a recent Webmaster video John Mueller did say that they wouldn’t be updating it going forward.

Last year we heard straight from Matt Cutts’ mouth not to expect another pagerank update that year. However a few months later, a technician was working on something in the pagerank software place (i’ve no idea how else to describe it) and whilst there, decided to push a Toolbar Pagerank update. Which caught everyone by surprise.

Now though, this isn’t a “we’re not updating it for a while” it is a ” We probably won’t update it ever again”. If so, what does this mean for SEOs? Not much really. With Google shifting their focus to high authority sites, there will be something completely new used to decide this and it looks like Google isn’t giving the game away. Check out John Mueller in the video below:

So although PR Toolbar might have gone the way of the dodo, there’s nothing to suggest we won’t see something similar rolled out at some point.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey