A lot of search engine watchers have been getting twitchy because Google’s anticipated Pagerank update hasn’t surfaced. In turn, this has prompted many to speculate that Google are doing away with publicly available Pagerank data altogether.

I believe that it’s in Google’s interest to kill Pagerank, and here’s why: Google hates paid links, unless they come from Google themselves. Matt Cutts has been making a lot of noise about Google discounting the paid links they detect. (Paid links are fine of course, but only if they come from one of Google’s own programmes.)

Website owners typically pay for links for one of two reasons.

Paid links for PR. A large portion of the paid link market comprises website owners paying for high PR links in the hope that the PR will filter through to them. By killing Pagerank, the metric by which these links are bought and sold evaporates instantly, and the market with it.

Paid links for traffic. If website owners aren’t buying links for PR, then they’re buying links for traffic. Google already has this part of the market covered, under the guise of Adsense.

Call me cynical, but by neglecting their PR updates could they be scaring people away from Pay-for-PR link buying and into Adsense campaigns?

In any case, none of this matters because anyone who knows their onions realises that Pagerank is just one of many, many factors in determining one’s position in the SERPs. There’s certainly a positive correlation between PR and SERP placement but there are many exceptions to the rule. I wish website owners (and amateur SEOs) would worry about generating quality content rather than putting green pixels in a grey bar. But that’s another issue for another day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 1:04 pm and is filed under google, internet, seo, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.