I'd like to talk a moment to mourn the passing of PageRank, the secret sauce that made Google the spicy search engine we once knew and loved.

Some might argue that blogs killed PageRank. But the fact is, the online world goes through pretty impressive changes every few years. And, believe it or not, PageRank is old. In Internet time, PageRank may have been well into middle age.

Its death hasn't been announced yet, but the time is near. The signs have been around for quite a while.

You see, PageRank was a brilliant yet simple idea at the time: use the structure of the web itself to determine what is and is not popular. But that's behind us. Google is no longer concerned solely with what's popular. Like most companies, they also care a lot about what sells or what advertisers want. Many speculate that Google is responding to various pressures to keep blogs from tainting their results. Perhaps.

With all the recent discussion of Google removing (or not removing) blogs from their index, people have been barking up the wrong tree. Google doesn't have to remove them. The simply need to identify them in a reliable way. Then they can be penalized (given a lower PageRank). And, believe it or not, that's not terribly difficult to do if you have a good web map and a few blogs to use as starting points.

It has already happened. And the results are less than ideal. A Google search for "jeremy" now [sometimes] yields something far different than what it used to. Notice that Google now believes that my home page is more important than my blog. That is, for lack of a better term, retarded.

(It seems that Google has only partially deployed this. If you play around long enough, you can get the old answer from one of their search clusters. That's how I got both of those screenshots. So far it seems to be a 50/50 chance, at least from the West Coast.)

The fact that I'm no longer the first result isn't the issue. I never expected that to last.

Let's be honest. My home page sucks. Nobody links to it anymore. Sure, there are a lot of old links, but let's look at what Google can tell us. There are roughly 600 links to my home page while there are over 1,800 links to my blog. There are three times as many links to my blog, and I'd argue they're more significant. They're newer. They're often more than mere pointers because there's commentary about me or what I write.

Anyway, draw your own conclusions.

Google has a really hard problem to solve. It's not unlike the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked. The act of Google trying to "understand" the web caused the web itself to change. Blogs are only a recent example of that. Oddly, unlike many of the previous problems with Google (see also: search engine optimization companies; link spammers; google bombing), blogs were not designed to outsmart Google. They just happen to use the web and hyperlinks the way we should have been using them all along. Now they're being penalized for that, it seems.

It'll be interesting to see how Inktomi and Microsoft handle this "problem" too.

Oh, I should note that this could all be a bug and I'm just using it as an excuse to ramble. But you all knew that, right? My readers are smart. All three of them. :-)

Posted by jzawodn at May 24, 2003 09:20 PM

Reader Comments
# Kalyan Varma said:

Totally agree with you on that. Each time the google bot hits my site, It keeps indexing the same pages, and all the new pages, well.. it just ignores them.

damn google.

on May 24, 2003 10:49 PM
# Vegard said:

Searching for my name, "vegard", on Google used to bring my homepage/blog-thingy to the number one spot. Now I've been bumped to the _second page_. On fourth place you'll find the address to where my site used to be, all it contains is a rederict to my site's current domain...

on May 25, 2003 02:16 AM
# Micah said:

So by removing links to other popular weblogs from our pages, we can raise our Google ranking? Does that make sense?

on May 25, 2003 02:31 AM
# Josh Woodward said:

Heh, I've had the same problem as Kalyan, where new pages either never get indexed, or are indexed months later, while existing pages are re-indexed often. I've also had the same problem as Vegard, where a search for "Josh Woodward" brings back my old site on fruhead.com (long abandoned, and not really ever used) which now bounces to joshw.org (my real site / blog). The second hits are actually joshw.org, but not the main pages.

And also, Jeremy, I agree that it's not too hard to find what is a blog with 99% certainty. However, how do you decide what *parts* of a site are blogged? I'd have to completely restructure my site because everything is integrated, and they'd have to write a custom bot to determine which parts are "real" and which are "unreal".

on May 25, 2003 04:34 AM
# Russ said:

Be thankful you only dropped a few notches. A search for "Russell" went from #6 to #96... That's pretty harsh. Not unexpected, but a severe drop nonetheless...

Somebody left this link on my blog when I bitched about this a few days ago: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/ has a forum on Google and the idea being passed around is that they're using OLD index data for some reason. (To go back in time before weblogs ruled their index?) It makes sense based on what I've seen from the searches. But it looks like it's affecting only the *index* pages, not the sub pages, because I'm still getting a ton of referrals for the stuff on on the inside.

Massive changes like this are going to affect not only blogs. I expect that this is a work in progress...

-Russ

on May 25, 2003 05:03 AM
# Russ said:


One more...

Just perusing those forums again and noticed this comment: "Even google is getting screwed with this index, try searching for 'search engine' - google has been #1 and is now #3 behind altavista and excite.... lol "

That *is* amusing... ;-)

-Russ

on May 25, 2003 06:13 AM
# Mark said:

To be fair, though, to expect your first name to always return in the top 10 is probably not very likely. I would never expect a search for "mark" to show up there - it is a common name, and not particularly relevant. (I would expect a search for my full name, however, to find me properly, which it does.) I'm not surprised that a search for "jeremy" would follow the same path - most people typing in "jeremy" in a search engine probably aren't looking for you. (Sorry Jeremy!)

If they can minimize those kind of results, and yet maintain page ranks for other issues (blog archives often have very relevant information on other searches) they could have a win-win scenario. I'm not sure _how_ they could do that, but I think it would be worth pursuing.

Pushing blogs in their own search sphere may ultimately be the only solution that is viable, but I think that many people will end up losing out on good information because of that.

on May 25, 2003 07:40 AM
# Bill Brown said:

Searching on my name puts my blog on the first page whereas it used to put my home page there. Same results with bbrown.

In other words, I've experienced the exact opposite results from you, Jeremy.

on May 25, 2003 07:52 AM
# wil said:

I have to disagree here. I'm with Google on this one. If I'm searching for Jeremy, your full name, I expect to land at your front door. I don't expect to land in your bedroom, in your bottom droor, reading your diary. If I want to read your diary I'll start at the front door, see what's there and then come in.

Now if I had searched for Jeremy Diary, then I would expect to be linked straight to your blog, which Google does.

All looks /very/ good to me.

on May 25, 2003 08:31 AM
# Graham said:

Decent analysis, but surely you can do better than the 4th grade descriptive term, "retarded?"

on May 25, 2003 12:42 PM
# anand said:

Google is constantly evolving.

It is not as if google has always relied on PageRank alone. For example, take the last month's google update itself. It was a major change in the algo which changed SERPs all around. For details check the http://webmasterworld.com/forum3 page. You will find thousands of posts on the dominic update.

What I am coming to is that as the web evolves, google is changing itself to better understand the web. Which is what I like about google.

on May 25, 2003 08:07 PM
# drew said:

"PageRank is dead"-- really now, that's a pretty ridiculous statment. You seem to have fogotten the golden rule of the internet: its not dead until somebody comes out with something better. Try as you may there Jeremy, but the effectiveness of PageRank is not gauged by your spot on such an arbratry search as your first name. PageRank is, and will remain, the absolute best way to search the net for many, many years to come your conspiracy theroies not withstanding.

on May 26, 2003 12:31 AM
# David said:

Interesting. However, have you thought about what google 'sees' when it visits your weblog page?

There's a title, a load of links, and a bunch of content *which changes every time google visits*. If google is doing a good job, it won't cache any of this content - If I search for 'pagerank is dead' next week, I don't want a link to your top weblog page, i want a link to your archived page.

Most weblog homepages have virtually no useful content (from a search engine's perspective, anyway). Your homepage, on the other hand, is full of information about Jeremy, which will be as valid next week as it was last week.

on May 26, 2003 01:32 AM
# Jon Gales said:

Just check the "related links via google" sidebar to see how PageRank is doing :P. It needs tweaked a bit, but it kicks over anything else.

on May 26, 2003 09:50 AM
# msd said:

Hello Jeremy,

I cannot fully agree with your conclusion about Googles ranking! At least not in the moment!!

I think, the momentary ranking is a temporary ranking! It's because Google is making some major changes on there structure of datas. And I expect that in two or three weeks many results are nearly the same as one month ago!

Maybe you are right, that PageRank will not so much important anymore in future. By the way, it's already not the most important ranking criteria (IMO)! But I think it will be a criteria in future too, maybe with minor importance.

Of course, the near future will bring some changes of Google algorithm. If this will affect weblogs, we will see. But I cannot imagine, that Google will penalize blogs!

Matthias

on May 27, 2003 02:45 AM
# michael heraghty said:

Hi Jeremy,

I don't agree with your statement that: "Google now believes that my home page is more important than my blog."

If you take your blog's entry page to be: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/ then you will see that it has a Page Rank of 7, as does your homepage.

For some reason though, you have linked the words "my blog" to an archives index (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/), which has a PR of 6. But surely this is not the main page for your blog?

Have you made an error?

Regards,
m

on May 27, 2003 07:27 AM
# rich said:

i think maybe you're being a little premature declaring PageRank dead :)

check this out: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nf/20030522/bs_nf/21570

further, the consensus (if you can have such a thing) in the SE watching world is that Google is carrying out some heavy-duty changes to its algo (this has been confirmed by a Google employee on the forum you mention) over the coming weeks.

the effects you are seeing at present are symptoms of these changes being implemented.

currently there's theory that these changes will lead to a more continuously updated Google index, rather than one large index update per month, with additonal "freshbot" content added throughout.

on May 27, 2003 07:48 AM
# Gerald said:

Hi Jeremy, I don't think that pagerank is dead, but it has become much weaker over the years. As the current update isn't really "up to date" we will see enough changes over the next days and weeks. I predict the return of the Z-blog homepage - at least into the top3.

on May 27, 2003 03:09 PM
# Tim said:

Every time someone somewhere figures out a system (stock market, legislation, Google page rankings) and makes a HUGE impact in that system the owners of that system change it.

It happens ALL the time. The wankers call these "loopholes" when in reality its merely playing the game by the rules given. Most people hate success when its not *their* success so, loopholes = bad.

Blogs starting working the system and that pushed out the geneology pages that update once a year. So you change the system yet again.

Welcome to the real world.

on May 27, 2003 04:23 PM
# himself said:

Google likes to torment searchers. People will search google for this or that and get a results summary seemingly from my blog. woops, where's that content? blogger archived it. The referer logs reveal a whole host of likely vexed visitors and they flip back and forth between google search results and my main link.

evil google.

ehh.. it is fun sorting out how to take terrible advantage of indices

on May 28, 2003 11:11 AM
# ben Nolan = said:

google needs to find a way to Calculate Correct pagedates, and some marvelous heuristic to identify the information quotient of said page. that Could be the new pagerank.

on May 28, 2003 10:42 PM
# Mr Crip said:

There's too much going on with Google at the moment, you creating a storm in a teacup, blogs are dull anyway, they should be placed way deep in any search listings

on May 30, 2003 04:03 AM
# ordinarysurfer said:

Well not that I want to say what's right or wrong here... but I'm fed up landing on "blogs" that are of the opinion that what they say is correct. I'm not suggesting that you Jeremy are at fault but I did read some of the trackback links..

Somewhere in amongst my surfing I suddenly realised there was no "official" source of information and unfortunately that is what I was searching for.

If I want to know the meaning of a word I don't look up the web to find out what everyone else *thinks* the meaning of the word is... I look for a recognised information source "a dictionary".

So I'm sorry because I do enjoy reading blogs when time permits but your article was written on 24th May and this article wriiten on the 9th May was the original source of this *RUMOUR*, and if any bloggers would actually like to try and find the reason for, or the outcome of, this article I think you would then be also very interested to find out that there is a very *big* world outside blogs...

on May 31, 2003 03:43 PM
# owen said:

google has been off for a couple a weeks. A search for owen would drop me at number 5. now it's on page 2 and the cache is of a older version of my site.

while if I search for the full 'owensoft'. I appear at number one and the cache is new.

Also I do believe there are such things as bad links. Haven't founf any yet but I've linked to sites (such as portals and search engines) that mess with my google rank.

anyway I hope what ever they're doing works.

on June 3, 2003 11:32 AM
# Micah said:

A referrel in my logs shows that I'm back as the number 4 "Micah" on Google. Has there been a regression in the Pagerank algorithm?

on June 7, 2003 03:12 AM
# Gerald said:

PageRank of Yahoo dropped down to 9. And the PR of the JZ-blog homepage is down to 6. That's not nice and in case of Yahoo very surprising.

on June 19, 2003 09:27 PM
# Martin said:

@wil: I totally agree!

---

I wonder why nobody in discussion has talked about Google buying Pyra Labs, the makers of Blogger. How would you rate this? Well, it could just be an indicator, that folks at Google realized that blogs were changing the way PageRank behaved. By buying Pyra they were also buying more know-how on how blogs work.

Anyway, I don't see any reason to believe that PageRank is dead. Nice rant though.

on July 10, 2003 04:04 AM
# Rocky said:

Google owns blogger.com though. Perhaps they are trying to embrace?

on July 10, 2003 11:28 AM
# Calippo Tecks said:

Hmm...what are you laughing with?"bwahahaha google is dead!" Do you really think google will be dead? Damn, you're so stupid, of course not!

on August 7, 2003 12:56 PM
# Party Poker Rounder said:

Ironic actually, I'm actually a random web stumbler who dropped in on your blog because I was doing some research on PageRank. This particular article is actually a PR5 which shoots it quite high on Google's rankings. If you didn't have this high of a page rank, your page would have dissapeared into the conglomorate mess of all other low ranked pages on Google.

I guess the question for you personally, is if you regard yourself with a high-enough esteem that your thoughts on PageRank deserve a high page rank itself, or if you view yourself as just another blogger whose views shouldn't be valued by Google.

on August 9, 2003 09:46 AM
# u dum said:

yyyyyyyyaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnn

on August 10, 2003 08:52 PM
# james said:

I have to say, they must deal with it pagerank different. this is going to kill blogs.

on August 15, 2003 11:20 AM
# tom said:

funny how they are the rank is so outdated so soon

on August 15, 2003 11:31 AM
# kitchen said:

Looks like pagerank is finally going the way of the dodo. No big surprise there, since it has been easy to take advantage of for a long time. It is no secret that deliberately cross linking can increase your rank,...

on August 15, 2003 02:16 PM
# Alexandre said:

Hi

I just want you to tell me what is the problem with pagerank of inexmedia.net

What you how me nothing... :) I know

check on statisticom the link ot hit and how the inexmedia inbound are linked together.... Its a service that I am asking... you are bigger than me... but just like that... and I will publish your stuff in French with your name... exchange of service... but I want to know what you think!

thanks

on August 30, 2003 10:20 AM
# cancel said:

PageRank is still far from dead five months later. I think its obituary was posted prematurely.

on September 27, 2003 08:02 PM
# Estariel said:

Jeremy said "PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked"

Isnt this the likely fate of any useful/quality search engine?

As soon as the world of marketing understands how to poison the ranking system, they will do so. Either via financial persuasion to the search engine provider or by manipulating their content to advance its ranking.

Is it ironic to see so many posters here avidly trying to increase their own PageRank regardless of the intrinsic (or Google defined) worth of their content?

on October 1, 2003 03:02 AM
# freeware said:

pagerank is not dead, it's only becoming less important for the serp's nowadays. in the past pagerank had a higher priority for ranking but today other points of optimizing are more important and pagerank less important, but's not dead.

on October 1, 2003 11:45 AM
# bad_st said:

R.I.P.: And find a way to give me relavant results.

on October 1, 2003 02:39 PM
# Laurent said:

Page Rank is nevertheless useful used with directories. A site such as the one I'm the webmaster of gets known thanks to directories. Once, I saw that, for some good keywords of course, there were 2 pages of my hand-made directory inscriptions (well, for the previous address of the site in fact) leading the results. This is something they have corrected then: why wouldn't it be the case for others? The site, which can be considered a primary information source, is still number one so that's fine.
P.S. There's now a "spectrum" with empty explanation on google.com, what's that? (Sure it won't stay uneffective)

on October 2, 2003 10:05 AM
# fishfinger said:

Well I applaud Google knocking down blogs. Who the hell wants to read loads of shit about all the nothing someone didn't get up to at the weekend anyway. I think it was a bloody stupid idea to start indexing blogs anyway. If you guys want to fill pages and pages with shit, great, knock yourselves out, but I don't see why people looking for something other than vague ramblings should be inflicted with them.

on October 3, 2003 03:57 AM
# einar said:

I hope it good for us.

on October 7, 2003 05:36 AM
# said:

Blogs should be treated as a sub-section of the web. If the web is not reserved for meaningful, usefull content as opposed to "GOSSIP" no one will be able to find anything in just a few years.

on October 7, 2003 05:43 AM
# Richard Rost said:

The problem with Google is that they're attempting to please advertisers. If they would just stick to bring a good SEARCH ENGINE and not a huge billboard, they would be a better service.

on October 8, 2003 10:47 AM
# Brian Willis said:

I'm confused, Google seem to be doing something with the listings as my site is gradually dropping in rating despite more people linking to me. Lycos say that 43 sites link to www.collectibles.tzo.com, however Google now say only 6 do! BTW how did you manage 1600?

on October 9, 2003 02:22 AM
# Webmaster T said:

Great article Jason! I have been saying PageRank is broken for over a year. It isn't broken as an algo perse but its effectiveness in determining authority is! Seo's and web designers have killed it. Bloggers are a small group in comparison to this lot. I knew there was potential for a problem when increasingly the techniques for optimization for Google are link related or inflating PR by hiding links. The problem seems to stem from poor analysis of sites linking to each other.

If sites that link to each other are not included in the PR calculated a lot of the skew is removed. If only 1 link were counted then again skew is dampened. The problem is this is not the case and in fact IMO, it has gotten worse in the last month or so! This IMO is potentially going to kill Google's popularity as it is evident the quality of results is not as good as they were even 6 months ago.

on October 9, 2003 12:02 PM
# Webmaster T said:

Great article Jason! I have been saying PageRank is broken for over a year. It isn't broken as an algo perse but its effectiveness in determining authority is! Seo's and web designers have killed it. Bloggers are a small group in comparison to this lot. I knew there was potential for a problem when increasingly the techniques for optimization for Google are link related or inflating PR by hiding links. The problem seems to stem from poor analysis of sites linking to each other.

If sites that link to each other are not included in the PR calculated a lot of the skew is removed. If only 1 link were counted then again skew is dampened. The problem is this is not the case and in fact IMO, it has gotten worse in the last month or so! This IMO is potentially going to kill Google's popularity as it is evident the quality of results is not as good as they were even 6 months ago.

on October 9, 2003 12:02 PM
# jacob said:

After looking at all the trackback links to this page I decided to search for 'pagerank' on google. Guess what!? This page was right up there close to the top! Hmmm....maybe pagerank isn't dead. :D

on November 2, 2003 12:38 AM
# LinkAdage said:

At www.linkadage, I have found blogs that have high rank that are turning away $1,000+ per month in simple text link advertising.

Some bloggers don't believe in advertising, others are unaware the are sitting on a goldmine, and other blogs need more work to get their blogs ranking a bit higher.

Text links are some of the best selling and least obtrusive ads on the net. Today, blogs are some of the highest ranking sites across the board on the web. This has led some savvy bloggers to auction off text links on their web sites for over $100 per month a piece. Add ten links in the footer of your blog and the average blogger would have over $1,000 per month to pay the server bills.

The high power blogs can easily get $300 per link. This is a great time for bloggers to makes some excellent text link advertising revenue on their sites. Spend some time looking into this before the opportunity passes you buy.

Remember, make sure you combine a link advertising strategy with other options like banner ads, PPC, etc...

on November 5, 2003 08:22 PM
# Party Poker said:

One vote for 'No' please

on November 8, 2003 02:32 AM
# Henni Bloggi said:

Hi there,

I was also searching for "pagerank" and jeremy´s blog archiv was in the top10. But I agree with him, pagerank is dead, perhaps google is also dead. I wrote an article about "Google is dead" too in German but I´m to lazy to translate it. :-)

on November 13, 2003 06:16 AM
# said:

This blog theme is commented at http://www.miislita.com/searchito/business-scene.html

It seems to agree with Jeremy but for theoretical reasons embedded in the PageRank metric. It's very interesting, especially the referenced material.

on November 13, 2003 02:50 PM
# 555 said:

very useful for me

on July 16, 2004 12:02 AM
# Paul Short said:

Personally, I hate the PR thing. It's become so much of an obsession with webmasters lately that a lot are refusing to let -PR4 or 5 sites link to theirs!

What are these people going to do when google overhauls it's ranking procedures and they fall out of their top 10 comfort zone? What are they going to do when the only option left is to develop "unique" content and duplicate stuff piped into their pages via RSS?

Content is king. Always has been and always will be.

on September 5, 2004 06:10 PM
# web site template blogs said:

Google pagerank may be is going for good but this is not the proper way. There are so many people who have wasted their time on geting a higher pagerank. Google cannot possibly stop pageranks just like that. They will have to move on to something reliable and tell the net users about before moving on at least 1 -2 years in advance.

on September 7, 2004 03:11 AM
# shik ismail said:

i don't understand the google pagerank system,
last time my web site is displayed in first page of google, now its not showing even in 10th page..

on October 11, 2004 01:56 PM
# herry ken said:

Google buys search engine - PageRank RIP? New post on The RegisterGoogle has bought Kaltix, a three-month-old, three-man Stanford startup that's working on personalized and context-sensitive search.Actually Jeremy Zawodny's point that PageRank is dead ...

on October 12, 2004 01:51 AM
# Brian Turner said:

The big problem with PageRank wasn't the system itself - as much as the way they so publicly marketed it.

When Google started flaunting PageRank in webmaster's faces, not elast via the toolbar, webmasters naturally wanted to know:

a) What value assigned to their pages
b) How to increase that value.

So Google created the currency of PageRank and people bought into it according to the scale that Google marketed it.

So the system was a good idea - but it was killed by turning a search process into a webmaster gimmick that carried purchasing value.

I hear that Yahoo! has something sinmilar...Webrank...but if you want it to be useful for search - as with any search tech - simply don't flaunt it in people's faces, and then wonder why people try and take the value of the system for themselves...


on October 13, 2004 01:10 AM
# Zeia said:

It's unfortunate that everyone is optimizing for google. Because of this, we have way too many spammy sites. Google is evolving. But there has got to be a better way to rank pages.

on October 14, 2004 10:59 AM
# ZA said:

I personally don't understand this PR-Rating any how, but I have noticed that many webmasters won't link to your site becuase you have no hight PR-rating. I haven't figured out whats PR of my site www.aziaportal.com, but what I do have noticed is that it is quite difficult for other webmasters to link to my site, and I assume that my site is no hot potato!

on November 16, 2004 02:16 AM
# Ed said:

yeah pagerank is a prehistorical tool

on November 16, 2004 10:29 AM
# Todd said:

De-emphasizing blog page value will be an inevitability. Still this seems to me to be a ways off, it could be difficult to decipher between actual directory archive names / html files and dynamically written mod_rewrite url's.

on November 21, 2004 12:44 AM
# said:

Funny really, interesting that a blog thread is still alive some 18 months after it was first started, might well be that in the minds of a few, PR is very much alive and kicking.

Oops nearly put in me url full of hotel aff content..but thought better of it ;)

on November 23, 2004 09:58 AM
# Google blog said:

I just read an article which says toolbar pagerank is dead, That is a bit on controvery, recently a posting in search engine watch suggest that google toolbar is for entertainment purposely,

that article which was previously written supports that theory,google seem to redirect SEOs from pagerank weird

on December 12, 2004 07:29 PM
# emmanuel said:

Looks like google still value inbound links ... your post is on first page of google for the keyword PageRank ...

on December 13, 2004 10:34 AM
# said:

Thinking that you can dominate the term "jeremy" for more than a heartbeat is very naive. I do SEO on google all the time and very popular keywords are hard to break into, and if you get a break, keeping them is equally as hard.

Not only is everyone optimizing for google, everyone is USING google as it generates 80% of the traffic to one of my web sites (thats over 150,000 referrals a month) yet my pages are also in the top 20 of MSN, YAHOO, etc. which nobody appears to use.

BTW, when you search for "Jeremy Zawodny" your BLOG ranks higher than your home page, also try searching "Jeremy blog", you're #2. You just shouldn't expect to hold onto "Jeremy" as a keyword, it's silly.

on December 21, 2004 12:47 PM
# Yisrael said:

I agree, pagerank doesn't even show my blog (usually), though it shows similarly old pages I have created.

on December 29, 2004 12:58 PM
# Marian said:

We're almost 2 years away from Jeremy's initial message. And now again, Jeremy's blog is on top of the search list (589 links to his home page and 15,200 links to his blog!!!).
And still PR is functional. Of course, Google diminished its value (when I look for something I wrote, it gives me not my home page, which also contains the keywords searched, but my content page, which of course have a much lower pagerank - only one link to it, from my web page, but it is more relevant).

on January 3, 2005 06:30 PM
# Hugo Vieira said:

Page rank is live, but google is only updating in a six month period. The last update as been on January, the next one is predicted to May. If you want to know your google page rank check a tool, developed by myself, that extracts PR from google toolbar: www.huebit.ws/tools/page_rank.php

on January 17, 2005 01:42 PM
# milky said:

Maybe your old homepage is higher weighted, because it looks more HTTP compliant, whereas your blog software is too dumb to send meaningful headers?

I don't understand why people still expect search engines to value inferiour pages with broken HTML and missing HTTP answer headers the same as real ones.

on January 20, 2005 06:49 AM
# Ben said:

I made a 43 things todo on this very topic.

on February 25, 2005 06:50 PM
# DNS said:

Jeremy,

You are a modern day Nostradamus and predicted the death of PageRank two years ago.

Excellent.

on May 29, 2005 09:03 PM
# William Donelson said:

For over 3 years, searching Google for: Taj Mahal - would give a result with our Explore the Taj Mahal website http://www.taj-mahal.net as Number One. Then, on the fateful day of 20 May 2005, we crashed to #11, well off the screen for 800 x 600 displays, and onto page 2 as well. Even though Explore the Taj Mahal has by far the highest number and quality of links-to, these don't seem to matter any more. Sigh.

on June 7, 2005 02:12 AM
# Edward Clarke said:

PageRank isn't dead because people still scramble to achieve a higher score. This sells Google so why would it stop? Until people stop downloading the toolbar and ignoring the magic score from 10 then there's no point dropping it.

What does PageRank mean anyway. I have plenty of zero PR sites getting page 1 results so I know the truth. However, we live in a Homer Simpson era where advertising dictates.

on July 20, 2005 02:21 AM
# Offshore Software Development Outsourcing said:

We are holding #1 positions on our sector keywords , website has unique content , good incomming links, but after mid march 2005 our positions are flux and in the current pr updation we loose some PR all links are working fine .

on July 25, 2005 11:16 PM
# model search america msa showcase said:

PAge rank in Google is not dead and it is the most important thing when it comes to SEO

on August 4, 2005 05:01 PM
# Scott Johnson said:

Sure, the PageRank technology itself is not dead. It is still in use. You can still see your PR in the toolbar. But the original ideology behind PR is what is dead. PageRank has been gamed just a bit much these days, and it is being abused. Perhaps the post should be called "Google is Dead"?

I have previously contributed my thoughts on the matter here:
http://speed.insane.com/archives/2003/11/10/ending_comment_spam.php

The rel="nofollow" fix really seems to have helped in the battle to fight PR abuse. But as you guys have already pointed out, PR is a major SEO tool and probably will be for a long time to come.

Cheers,
Scott Johnson
http://insane.com/

on September 18, 2005 06:42 PM
# Fredrik said:

It's been over two years since this post first came out. What has been happening since? Pagerank seem to still be around and just as popular. Would be interesting with a follow up on this one.

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on October 11, 2005 04:11 AM
# jimmi black said:

I keep seeing the page rank change at http://www.movixo.com and not sure why?

on October 20, 2005 10:38 PM
# the g said:

this page has a kuwl pr :D

on October 21, 2005 05:46 PM
# William said:

Nice article, hope we will see an update. I constantly monitor my weblog http://www.huang.com.br and yes, it changes every little often.

on December 1, 2005 03:40 AM
# Calvin said:

I didn't even know what page rank was 2 years ago when you wrote this ;-) It seems your prediction was partly correct, and partly not. PR is definitely still around and back links do seem to affect it, but the back link factor still seems mysterious. I have a site at http://www.adsensekingdom.com/
which achieved a PR3 with only one back link. I'm also amazed at the strength of this page here which is holding steady at a PR5 even though someone posted over 1000 outgoing porn spam links.

on December 3, 2005 03:30 PM
# dave foster said:

Jeremy,

I think you may have been right a couple of years
ago. Now, I regularly get beaten on hurricanes by all the major news sites, purely by virtue of their large numbers of links compared to my fairly few; and that's despite my site having more appropriate content.

BTW, MSN Search relies heavily on pagerank now, probably more so than Google, even though it's supposedly Google's technology.

Dave Foster

on December 9, 2005 08:41 PM
# Larry said:

Just in case anyone's interested, there's a tool that predicts your future Google Pagerank from multiple datacenters - www.futurepagerank.net

on December 13, 2005 06:43 PM
# E. L. Strauch said:

Google also uses DMOZ.org as a weight factor. Dmoz is a human edited directory. If you can get your domain in there (and it may take months or years, if you can get in it at all), you have a great shot of getting listed much higher. Beware the obnoxious and extremely rude behavior of the editors. How Google let’s them get away with that is beyond everyone.

on January 21, 2006 04:35 AM
# Kyle Carrington said:

I have to agree with something said here. Inconsistencies. I have seen sites I've built go through an absolute roller coaster of PR changes - almost weekly. That can't be a good sign - and more, lately than ever, do I see an emphasis on "anchor text". Look at the search for "miserable failure" situation, and as less dramatic example, in industry - would be the www.cakewalk.com site - ranking number #1 for "pro audio", (yet there web site has not even a single reference to the term "pro audio") all based on old links, created, when the released a product called "Cakewalk Pro Audio". Cakewalk software doesn't even rate highly as Pro Audio software - more like high end Home Audio. So much emphasis on anchor text... I see it everywhere!

on February 6, 2006 05:02 PM
# Home Furnishings said:

I believe page rank is overrated and that's Google is trying to stay away and downgrade the importance of PR. The most significant is your ranking on the serp. I have seen several sites keep the same ranking position even though their PR were dropped..........

on February 22, 2006 01:48 PM
# JRizos said:

ArticlesCorner.com was launched last February as a website to allow people to publish articles free and allow others to pick them up and use them as free content potentially creating hundreds of links back to the authors website.

Google has indexed hundreds of ArticlesCorner.com pages, about 450 to be exact and Alexa ranking has been climbing to about 90K with a daily of about 45k.

My questions is why has Google not assigned a PR to the website yet? I'm getting a very decent amount of traffic and looks like for what I hear from the people positng content they are aslo seeing pretty good results. How long does Google takes before they assign a PR to a site?

thanks,
JRizos.
ArticlesCorner.com

on March 25, 2006 09:59 PM
# Kevin Craig said:

The main issue that I have with page rank is that in the past when I've tried to convince people to post a free classified ad on my site, the first thing they said to me was that my site didn't have any page rank!

Well, it was a brand new site of 30 days at the time but 9 months later, I now have a PR3. Not that my PR3 actually means much in reality, but to the consumer it looks much better.

In my opinion, the real measure of a sites success is "true" link popularity and not Google PR. In about 8 months I had over 7,000 links to my site but since changing my linking strategy, that number has dropped considerbly during my experiment. I have since switched my linking strategy back to the way it used to be and my incoming links are beginning to increase again.

Anyway, my point is that page rank is truly over-rated.

on April 6, 2006 10:30 PM
# Sharmila Gopirajan said:

hmmm .. I tried what Russ said (try 'search engine' in google)
It is not 3 as he told .. It is 12th now ;-) .. Seriously something's wrong don't you think ..

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on May 21, 2006 03:43 PM
# Enric Naval said:

Note: I put a non-weblog url, so I'm re-posting. Hoorray for Rule #1.

Jeremy, you may want to update your conclusions on how google depreciates blogs.

The link count for your blog is now an order of magnitude bigger than for your webpage:

Homepage: 568
Blog: 12400

In spite of this difference, both pages have PR8. (*)

At least google is now smart enough to notice that a)they are in the same site b)the most important page in a site is not always the root directory .

You can also see how searching for "Jeremy Zawodny" turns up your blog and then you can see your homepage hanging from your blog, as it was an appendage of it :)


(*) Unfortunately, there is a sensible explanation for this: your blog has PR8 and then you have brought your homepage's PR up by linking accidentally to it from your blog :)

on June 14, 2006 11:01 AM
# Michael Pedone / SEO said:

One of the most common requests we get for our SEO services is "how high will you make our PageRank?"....I explain to clients that if you are going to pay us for our seo services, it should be to help increase your business revenues, not your Page Rank.

on October 8, 2006 06:23 PM
# Authentic Signed Sports said:

websites need to evolve as does google. If you design and add quality content to your site, then you will be rewarded with traffic and ultimately a site people will visit and others want to link to.

on October 19, 2006 04:16 PM
# Markus said:

"...Its death hasn't been announced yet, but the time is near. The signs have been around for quite a while...."

When?

on November 24, 2006 08:45 PM
# mark said:

Google has an outstanding PR system, the secret is to leverage your densitys correctly for your keywords in anchor text. For instance, a site yielding free online games or free screensavers or celebrity videos would have to be http://www.mi-cast.com

on December 1, 2006 12:18 PM
# Wim Hoogenraad said:

I don't understand PageRank anyway. Can you explain why the PageRank of my site ( webmasterslookup.com ) is 4 in the morning and is 5 in the afternoon? This is going on for 3 weeks now. I made a datacenter analyzer on this site (you can use it if you like) to find a reason.
My best guess is that Google controles the DNS-servers to to redirect the traffic to the different datacenters. The PR on this datacenters is not the same....

Greatings, Wim

on December 18, 2006 05:26 AM
# Linux Consulting said:

I think that Google has taken a bigger stance on PR then Yahoo (and MSN we all know has the best spam and crap filter of them all I know because I make spam blogs and MSN banns them in about 48 hours).

Yahoo loves SPAM and PR and cares all too much about how many back links a site has.

Thanks,

The Tek, LLC

on January 29, 2007 03:57 PM
# Sterling Silver Jewelry said:

Jeremy,

I believe page rank shown on the toolbar is a few months old and it is always behind. Fyi, your site came up in top 3 when I searched "blogs with high PR".

on February 16, 2007 06:44 AM
# Brian Laks said:

Hi Jeremy,

I'm amazed at how a post from 4 years ago is still generating comments even after all this time... By the way, your blog is now number one for "jeremy", followed by your home page. Maybe someone at Google read your post! Sadly, my site www.brianlaks.com/ doesn't rank at all for Brian... But I do come up on the first page for Laks, so maybe in a few years me and google will be on a first name basis :)

on March 9, 2007 11:11 PM
# Nio said:

Thats a dificult question to answer, but I believe google will be able to improove PR.

on March 10, 2007 03:08 PM
# Pavel said:

Yep PageRank is almost dead but it IS still very important for webmasters. Not for bloggers, I suppose.

on April 8, 2007 01:02 PM
# Madonna Free Video said:

Decent analysis, but surely you can do better than the 4th grade descriptive term, "retarded?"

on April 14, 2007 06:27 AM
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