PageRank is Dead. Long Live mozRank
PageRank replaced by mozRank
Posted by Adam Hayes
PageRank is dead.
Really.
It's not coming back.
Thankfully we have mozRank.
PageRank is not Rankings
I want to make sure that you don't think that PageRank is how well your page ranks for a given keyword set. PageRank was Google's original idea of how to give weight or a numerical value to "how important" a page is. So while it is a factor in how well a page ranks, it is not THE deciding factor. For more on rankings see our rankings pages.
Why should you be more interested in mozRank than PageRank.
In the good-ol'-days PageRank was constantly updated and explained a lot about why certain sites outranked other sites. It was Google's bread-and-butter. However Google soon moved past their simplistic view of the web and started adding more and more key indicators in their ranking factors. This, along with people's greed for the magic green bar, caused Google to give less and less feedback to the community in the form of PageRank updates.
So despite Google's claims of making data free, they have locked down PageRank and don't even show an "outdated" PageRank like they used to. They've just stopped updating PageRank.
The biggest problem with this is that it takes away our ability to identify how deeply Google is crawling and indexing our pages. Being able to say that the homepage is a 5 and the product page is a 0 is a big indicator that you might have a problem.
Luckily there is a company that has noticed a need and has begun filling the void left by the absense of PageRank updates. Welcome SEOmoz's opensiteexplorer with their free and regular updates of mozRank.
Data should be free
SEOmoz's opensiteexplorer does what search engines should have been doing all along. Letting you know what they have "really" indexed without any "it is best if you don't know everything" filtering. Full data disclosure. Even now we don't get the true picture from tools like Google's Webmaster tools. Google worries that giving us too much information will tip their hand and give us too much knowledge and allow us to poison, spam, or manipulate the results. Oh wait, that is already happening with automatic content generators, adsense garbage sites, etc.. Luckily SEOmoz's opinion of making data free is in line with how much information they provide.
Regardless of whether Google descides to do another PageRank update or not, I've move past it. PageRank is dead to me. We now solely rely on mozRank. It is a better indicator. Period.
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