According to Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller, Google are “probably not going to be updating it going forward” – with ‘it’ meaning Toolbar PageRank.

Toolbar PageRank is essentially the only way for the public to know about a webpage’s PageRank, or the last publicly updated value of it. The last update took place (unexpectedly) in November last year, after many months of speculations about whether it’d happen or not. Since then, the usually quarterly-updated metric hasn’t been publicly updated to this date, and if Mueller is to be believed, it may not be updated ever again.

John Mueller responded to a webmaster’s question in a recent Google Webmasters’ Hangout by saying:

There are a few things where we do take action that you might not see directly. Toolbar PageRank is something that we have not updated for about a year now, and we’re probably not going to be updating it going forward… we have a lot of way to recognize these problematic links, and the sites selling those links, that essentially blocks the PageRank from passing through those sites.

You can watch the video yourself below:

Now, the reason why I wrote “Google Toolbar PageRank is Dead” in the post title instead of “Google’s PageRank is Dead” is because it doesn’t signify even one bit that the whole concept of PageRank and its importance in Google’s algorithms is going away. If there are indeed no new updates to the toolbar PageRank going forward, it’d simply mean, Google aren’t willing to share the PageRank of sites and webpages with the public anymore. This could be because of a few reasons:

• To discourage spammers and link buying/selling.
• The cost and man hours involved in making their internal PR data public through the toolbar, they believe, is not worth it anymore.
• PageRank is going to get less important going forward.

Though the third reason is a bit unlikely to be true, it is still a possibility no matter what. We’ve already seen brand new sites with few but quality contents outrank large, old sites and this trend is only set to increase in the future as Google focuses more and more on content quality and site usability.

Also, there seem to be additional ‘secondary’ algorithms in place which prevent PageRank alone to make a site rank first currently. This can be noticed from the trend of black-hat SEOs who have had to focus on manipulating things like social signals and bounce rate, alongside links, to get results.

Lastly, although Google might willingly or knowingly never might update the publicly available PageRank data again, it’s possible that they will accidentally do that again (last November’s update was apparently an ‘accident’ as well). Whatever may be the case, it’s time for folks to stop being crazy about PageRank alone and focus on other far more important aspects of SEO.