Has Google given up on its PageRank™ measure of websites? Is PR dead? Is it gone and forgotten forever?

Over recent months there has been much discussion on this aspect and given that a large portion of bloggers are being paid to blog, and that payment is based on the blog’s PageRank, it is a thorny issue to many bloggers.

The problem stems from the fact that for 8 months we have not seen any major updates to the value displayed in the toolbar. Yes, a few sites have moved up or down 1 ranking, even few have seen moves of 2 rankings, but the majority of websites are the same as they were at the beginning of April 2010, when the last major update took place.

Why would the system be dropped? Well PR is just a measure of the combination of how many other websites link in to your website and their own PR value. And that means that if people start trading and buying links, the whole system can collpase in on itself.

So Google needed a new idea. And to me that is monitoring what people actually do on websites. Do they bounce, or do they continue their research? And how does that pattern compare to other sites for the same keywords.

This information is available – through Google’s Analytics and those people still using the PageRank Toolbar.

My only question is – why do we keep seeing minor changes? I think it is so that we all think it is still active and they can continue to grab a small amount of data through it.

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