Friday, April 15, 2016

Google Seems To Have Abandoned Page Rank And All Websites Now Show Zero Page Rank

Speculations about abandonment of Google's page rank was in abundance in recent days. However, there is no official declaration or news from which date Google would be dropping the page rank indication. It seems Google has finally dropped the page rank from today evening i.e. 15-04-2016.

As a result, the blogs, websites and other pages are now showing zero page rank. The search engine optimisation (SEO) industry has to now adopt new and innovative techniques to make their clients happy.

This is followed by a manual action penalty that Google has rolled recently against link farms and splogs. Google has been fighting against splogs for long but this is a continuous fight between negative or black hat SEO professionals and Google.

Now quality of contents, user friendly pages and relevance of the material would play more decisive roles. At the same time, reliance upon Alexa rank would further increase as that would become a more conclusive criteria to judge the reputation, goodwill and relevancy of a website or blog.

As online advertisement industry is going to grow tremendously in the near future, blogs and websites with high Alexa rank would be in great demand. Similarly, Google's  AdSense program may also need to be suitably modified keeping in mind these developments.

Despite this step, Google may use the page rank for its internal purposes and making its algorithms more effective. The internal ranking mechanism may also be used to fight against websites or blogs that engage in spam behaviour or adopt negative SEO techniques. Nevertheless, page rank is no more publicly available to SEO community and other stakeholders.

We would cover these aspects in more details once official statements and news are out.