is google ditching pagerank? info carnivoreIs Google ditching PageRank? Is it possible that the number one thing that website owners chase could soon be history? Google hasn’t updated PageRank since early April 2010. That is odd. In fact being December now, that is the longest length of time that Google has gone EVER without a PageRank update.

Many people have been asking (including myself) when is the next Google PageRank update? But a better question might be is there going to be a next PageRank update? Why would I say that? Because for some SEO experts the question now is “Google ditching PageRank?”

Though opinions vary greatly in the realm of SEO one thing that is generally agreed upon is that PageRank is used to determine how powerful a site is based primarily on backlinks. PageRank essentially encourages SEO, which is really not what google wants at all. Consider this official excerpt from google.com in their technology overview section: “As Larry [Page] said long ago, we want to give you back “exactly what you want.” When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis. For example, we offer personalized search results based on your web history and location.

So, is Google Ditching PageRank or what?

The long delay since the last update, and the skipped June – July update which had taken place in every previous year, begs the question… could google be on the verge of ditching PageRank? No one really knows but people have their suspicions for certain. Almost four years ago rumors began to surface about google ditching pagerank around the same time they hired Australian student Ori Allon who developed the Orion Search algortihm, Ori’s engine has the ability to return results on pages not just for they keyword but also pages that were strongly related to the keyword. His engine was praised by Bill Gates, and obviously google took much interest to the point of hiring him and then in 2009 Google announcing that they had incorporated the Orion Search technology and algorithm into google search. Shortly after Dr. Allon left Google – he is now CEO of Julpan.

The Aftermath: If Google was really ditching PageRank.

If Google was really ditching PageRank the retaliation of the SEO community globally could be very interesting. Right now if you are searching to know about the next google PageRank update there are big ? Question Marks ? surrounding whether or not google will do a update at the end of December as they have done in the past. Google has yet to confirm when the next PageRank update will be, or if there will be one at all.

Bloggers and other web site owners put a lot of work into making their sites search engine friendly and building backlinks in the hopes of increasing their PageRank. Many other web applications rely on PageRank to determine the value of a website, for instance PayPerPost a popular Izea product offers sponsored posts to bloggers from advertisers willing to pay. A blogger is likely to get more offers with a higher PageRank. So if PageRank is no more, services like PayPerPost (and many others, such as rank builder SEO & traffic generation software) would have to begin looking at alternative options for measuring the power of a blog or serving their purpose.

It’s unlikely that Google is going to tell us anything before the end of this year. The vast majority of website owners are probably sitting around anticipating a PageRank update come this New Year’s eve. From my perspective the removal of PageRank would have to be accompanied by another replacement measuring stick. PageRank is currently the only publicly supplied measuring stick that google offers, getting rid of it would give competitors such as Alexa and their popular Alexa Rank too much room to move.


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How do you think the SEO industry would handle news like this? What do you think? Could Google really be ditching PageRank?