PageRank was a patent created by Google’s founders to measure the seperation of degrees between a list of trusted websites (known as seed sites) and your website. The closer you are to a trusted website in terms of interlinking, the more PageRank you receive. PageRank, backlink juice and link equity all refer to the same things.
If you have been working in the industry for more than a few years, you will undoubtedly remember the excitement that came when you heard that there had been an update to the PageRank toolbar.
With any luck, your recent efforts would have delivered an increase in your PageRank score, knowing that this meant that Google was now viewing your site as more authoritative than it previously was. An increase in your PageRank score was a great demonstrator that your SEO strategy (and, in particular, your link building strategy) was working.
Fast forward to 2021, and PageRank is rarely mentioned.
But that is not because it is no longer important, just that it is no longer a public-facing metric. And when SEOs can no longer measure something, they eventually stop talking about it. However it still plays an important role in refining the website authority and planning the link building strategy for any website.
Factors That Influence(d) PageRank and That Still Matter
Of course, there are, and were, factors that influence Page Rank.
As we already discussed that not all links are equal in terms of the PageRank that they pass. But just what are some of the factors that can (and have previously done so) influence PageRank?
Here are few factors that plays an important role:
- Anchor text
- The likelihood of being clicked
- Internal links
- Nofollow links
You need to understand not only what these influencing factors are but also how they apply to SEO in 2021, which you need to be using and which to avoid as part of your tactics of choice.
Why Did Google Retire the PR Toolbar?
SEOs became obsessed with PageRank, and it quickly became the most focused on SEO tactic, even above creating great content and a solid user experience.
The problem was that by publicly sharing a PageRank Score, this became easier for SEOs to manipulate, alongside influencing factors such as anchor text, nofollow, and the reasonable surfer model.
SEOs knew how they could use PageRank to rank their websites higher, and they took advantage of this.
If we look at this from Google’s perspective, the public-facing PageRank toolbar was the problem. Without this, there was no accurate measure of a web page’s authority (at least officially).
Ultimately, SEOs abused PageRank and used it to manipulate rankings, leaving Google with no real choice other than to retire the toolbar, which happened in 2016.
Why PageRank Still Matters in 2021
PageRank still matters in 2021 maybe not directly from the front, but has some linking in the backend to help the algorithm understand the website’s authority.
Just because there is no longer a toolbar that gives us a web page’s PageRank score doesn’t mean it is not still used.
In fact, in 2017, Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed on Twitter that they were still using PageRank.
I have the above post is useful for those looking for more information about on this topic, the source of this content is from really authoritive website and SEO master and our experience into this domain from almost 12+ years for now. SEO is an evolving things due to the growing complexity of the web and numbers of websites coming up everyday. Therefore, its really important for google to have a robust system which is update in fetching the right set of information to its users and this is how the algorithm updates come into the picture. Backlink building is also becomes very complex and webmaster are well aware about techniques that work in the present system, Dynamics in the search system helps to avoid any spammy things and keep them at distance.