For today’s SEO throwback thursday we will be looking at Google Pagerank. It was a way to determine your sites importance, used in SERP rankings and a great way to see how your marketing efforts where resulting in your websites success.

Pagerank was a simple number between 0-10 that showed the importance of a website or page based on the Pagerank of sites linking to theirs. Google updated it about 4 or so times a year, up until Novemeber, 2013 when it was discontinued.

Why Was Pagerank discontinued?

As Google’s algorithm became more sophisticated, Pagerank was less of a ranking signal for SERPS. As well the SEO community was obsessed with their Pagerank and how to improve it. Forums would fill with hate anytime an update was delayed. Eventually Google wanted to move away from visually showing website owners their Pagerank although it was still used internally to help shape ranking results.

Another motive for Google moving away from Pagerank was the fact that around that time they were starting to crack down on paid links. Websites with a good rank could easily extort money from people looking to improve their sites ranking by selling them links. The higher the Pagerank, the more money they could charge for a link.

Living In A Post Pagerank World

For those that still need a metric to gauge their websites ranking power and see how their marketing efforts are paying off now have a few non Google options to choose from.

Moz have come up with their own that is one of the better ones with their Open Site Explorer. They use the metrics of Domain Authority and Page Authority. Unlike Pagerank, their rating is out of 100 so it gives you a better idea of how powerful your website is.

But Do These Rankings Really Matter

Honestly there are so many different metrics involved in ranking a site on Search Engines that these metrics are pretty much meaningless in terms of your sites ranking. However, they are still useful in determining the quality of your site as well as the quality of those linking to you.