New Google PageRank Algorithm Debunked

In my recent article on SEJ about Google PageRank I suggested that a new formula could be in action. The article has gone big on Twitter and LinkedIn, with hundreds of shares. And from some comments, it looks like many people accepted it for a fact.

Now I hate to break it but I have to admit that I was most probably wrong. So I need to write this follow-up article to prevent yet another SEO myth from spreading. Let me explain what happened:

I saw an unreasonably low toolbar PageRank value for my blog after the last update;

I started looking around for possible reasons;

I noticed many people observed similar effects;

I found an article by Bill Slawski about Google’s Reasonable Surfer model, which seemed to explain my observations and other people’s rankings well;

I decided to share my findings for consideration and discussion.

And the discussion followed! My article collected about 100 comments, and a few SEO experts came up to correct me. The problem is, too many people accepted the alleged news without doubt and spread it further, so now it is my responsibility to get things straight.

So what was the real cause of poor ratings?

Special thanks to Donna Fontenot for providing the most likely explanation for the effect that I and other webmasters observed. The toolbar PageRank value is known to lag substantially even after an update. Matt Cutts mentioned it in his blog post about what is a Google update.

Please note the difference between the toolbar PageRank (TBPR) and Google’s internal PR value used as one of their 200+ factors to rank pages. I should have made this distinction more clear in my original article, too. Toolbar PageRank is more or less useless today because of how rarely it gets updated, and how much it lags. You can safely ignore it. If you are good with your link building, you will notice that from improvements in your search rankings first, and toolbar PageRank value will catch up eventually.

This devaluation of toolbar PageRank even makes quite a few people declare that “PageRank is dead”. This includes some industry experts. Be careful when listening to these proclamations. Those people know what they are talking about, but they are referring to toolbar PageRank value, not the Google’s internal formula. Internal PR is still a significant ranking factor, albeit only one of the hundreds.

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