Goodbye Google PageRank... hello mozRank

Google's toolbar PageRank has not been updated for nearly six months now. This in itself is not unique and we know that this year is to see significant changes to Google search (Caffeine update) which gives an explanation to the delay. However, there are now quotes circulating from Google employees stating that the public PageRank metric is dead.

Susan Moskwa on Google’s webmaster forums said:

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 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.

I have opinionated on discussion forums in the past that Google would never close down their PageRank to webmasters and the SEO community as all that would happen is that another company would create their own metric system to replace it with. Well if they have shut it down then that company is SEOmoz and their metric system is mozRank.

Introduced in 2008, mozRank is based upon their now quite significant accumulation of Linkscape data. Like PageRank, mozRank is based on a score out of ten (although the latter goes to decimal places). Page mozRank is primarily based upon the number of incoming links, while domain mozRank also factors in domain diversity.

Admittedly, PageRank has become less and less important to SEO over the last five years but it does provide some crude measurements to the worth of a site / page. As an example, I run a feed aggregation site and I stipulate in the submission rules that sites with a homepage of less than a PageRank of 2 will not be included in the index. This is to insure that only sites that have been around for six months or more are accepted. I have found that crappy Made for Adsense websites are normally less than a PageRank of 2.

In the coming months it looks like I'll be switching over from PageRank to mozRank for my site.

Posted via web from Madhav Joshi