The Evolution or Demise of PageRank?

This weekend I was discussing the future of PageRank with a colleague, Deana. The metrics that often come to mind when discussing this topic include content quality, backlink quality, age, brand recognition, and adaptability for smaller devices. While some of these metrics are already in use, the relevance of others remains a topic of debate.

PageRank Leading to Questionable SEO Tactics

I’d decided to compose a longer blog post on why I felt it was time it disappeared, and that website owners should focus their attention on content, rather than worrying about external factors such as PageRank which really offered no solid guidance on ranking a website, and aided in steering many site owners to engage in questionable tactics with regard to acquisition of links, and ultimately led to a negative outcome, i.e. sites being penalised for unnatural links.

No sooner had I begun to type the first sentence of what I felt would be an ‘epic’ post about the demise of Pagerank, than an article dropped down in my feed box from Search Engine Land about no more PageRank updates in 2013. The article stated that Niels Bosch had asked the Head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, whether there would be another PageRank update before the end of the year. Matt responded, “I would be surprised if that happened”.

Will PageRank disappear forever, or will it evolve into something that provides a more accurate measurement of a webpage’s quality?  We’ll have to see what the new year and 2014 bring!