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Google Downplays PageRank: ‘It’s Just One Component of How We Rank Pages’
By Anna Johnson on March 16th, 2010Despite some Internet marketers’ continued pre-occupation with Google PageRank, Google has been downplaying PageRank over the past few years. Last year the company removed PageRank from its Webmaster Tools (see Google PageRank – Does It Still Matter?) and now Google’s own staff are telling us that PageRank is ‘over-hyped’.
According to Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa:
“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it (from Webmaster Tools) because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”
Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig says PageRank is ‘over-hyped’ and something Google never regarded as a big factor:
“There’s a technical formula that’s PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages, and that’s just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final search results. There’s all these other things that come in, but they don’t have a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that give you the final ranking, and that’s where we get confused.”
I think it’s disingenuous to say that Google never regarded PageRank as a ‘big factor’.
Even if Google never saw it as a big factor in its algorithm, PageRank has certainly played a major role in influencing the activities of Internet marketers and search engine optimizers. You don’t include something so conspicuous in the Google Toolbar on millions of people’s web browsers and not expect it to have a significant impact.
Source: Chris Crum, “PageRank is Still Obsessed Over Too Much,” Web Pro News, March 4, 2010
