It’s been a month now since Google updated the coveted PageRank. There was much speculation as to whether or not this statistical vote of confidence was going to survive for another update.  The previous update in January was preceded by nine-plus months of silence from the search giant. For years there has been talk amongst the industry that Google PageRank was going away.

The silence was deafening to some, to others they barely noticed a difference.  An important note in regards to Google PageRank is that Google is constantly running statistics on your site. This is nothing new. Just because there hasn’t been a PageRank update on your site certainly does not mean that Google hasn’t re-evaluated your site since your last update. I can assure you, your site has been re-crawled, indexed and ranked many times whether your PageRank reflects a change or not.

What does PageRank mean?

For the uninitiated PageRank is the little green (or grey) bar on the Google toolbar that indicates how important Google thinks your site is.  Better put would be Google’s quote on what it is to them and what it means:

“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

Many sites utilize PageRank to determine how much they can charge other site owners to purchase advertising or links from that site. In order to do this sometimes they will partake in grey hat or black hat optimization techniques. This is very dangerous as many website owners experienced mass ranking fallout during the initial Panda update.  If you are enhancing your rankings through questionable methods, Google will rightfully pull your rankings.

Don’t forget, now if that site you just spent money advertising on gets penalized and dropped from the index, they are taking you with them! Google judges you by the company you keep, especially if the sites you are associated with are of questionable character in their algorithm.

For search engine marketing agencies PageRank has always been a nice neat “look what we accomplished” badge. It is something tangible for clients to be able to look and associate progress with the pretty green bar.

The other question you have to ask yourself is how important is PageRank?

The problem with paying for advertising based on PageRank is that it is becoming much less important to Google in the grand scheme of things. There has been a great deal of speculation that Google is doing away with this metric. They have already removed it from webmaster tools, changed updates to occur what appears to be every six months rather than quarterly and flat out announced that it really isn’t that important to them and that we are putting too much value in that little number.  Google is no longer supporting the toolbar for Firefox v.5 and up, eliminating the ability to even see PageRank if you’re browsing with a new version of Firefox.

But does PageRank promote a feeling of credibility to your website users? For some I’m sure it does. But for most, it will not keep a user from making a purchase on your site, recommending a good story on your site or even recommending your products or services providing you have built and maintained a well running site, with strong informative content and links that work!

If you really feel compelled to boost your Google PageRank, start a massive linking program and start writing strong, relevant content. DO NOT purchase links from anyone! These are link farms, Google is systematically hunting them down and eliminating them from the index, and it appears as though there is little care for the innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire.

You must be wondering, where do I focus my efforts if I’m going to back-burner PageRank? The answer to that is easy: Google +1.  We already know they are using your +1 score to rank your pages, but Google isn’t letting on how important it is to them just yet. So add that +1 button to your site and hope that folks start clicking it. We will see the importance of +1 ameliorate as Google continues the quest for social search dominance.