Google: It May Be Time for a New Term

[Safa]

Last year, Google noiselessly disposed of PageRank in Web designer Tools. Google Web designer Trends researcher Susan Moskwa had claimed, "We've been telling folk for a long time they should not target PageRank so much ; many site owners apparently believe it's the most significant metric for them to track, which is just wrong. We removed it as we thought that it was stupid to inform folks not to consider it, but then to show them the info, suggesting that they should look at it." Note : Watch our exclusive with Google's Matt Cutts at at live.webpronews.com. A large amount of folk questioned why Google would keep PageRank in the Google Toolbar, where it sits to this day. Search fan Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick speculated that Google wouldn't wish to remove it because PageRank is "too much of their branding." After some words from Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig today I am not so sure that is the case.

Note : Watch Norvig's main speech here ( or view our liveblog of the event ), and our exclusive interviw with him here : Norvig expounded at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that's "overhyped," and that Google never felt that this was such an important factor. They have always looked at all available data, mixing each available signal and exhausting to work out the only way to blend them.

Norvig said that it could be time for some re-branding with respect to PageRank. There might be a different term in the pipeline. "There's a technical formula that is PageRank, which is the way of judging the connections between pages, and that is only one element of how we rank the pages and you get your last search results. There's all these other items that come in, but they do not have a familiar name. So a few people apply PageRank to mean all the elements that give you the final ranking, and here's where we are getting confused. So potentially we require some other term for that...We'll get some selling fellows on it." I do not know how seriously the company is considering this, as Norvig appears to simply be talking off the cuff, but given the company's repeated stress on a scarcity of accent on PageRank, it wouldn't be surprising to see them change the name. the issue with that would be, that these same PR-obsessed web-masters would just become obsessive about the rebranded term.

[blueweb]

If pagerank disapear they will quickly need to replace it with somethign else, the whole web indtsury relay on PR of a given website, if it has a low PR the trust in it is low, if it is a forum, SB or social network site no one will come there if they have a low PR if it is high it will soon be flooded. So how do people decide where to post and be and where not if Google removes the PR?

[ashsmith]

Dont think website's relied on PR, many webmasters dont even care about PR any more. PR used to be important earlier then many started to abuse it. Then google change its algorithm. Now its all about optimization.
Yeah google has decided to replace PR with a different and more accurate system. The customers who come to a website dont look at the PR, they read the content on that website and look at the products.
There are plenty of websites which has less than 3 PR and ranks well on google and other search engines. IMO people should rely on SERPS not a little green bar.

[jpay]

Thats very true, but still they update the PR, they just did it last week as I see from my website.... will be cool to figure out how they will replace the PR in the new future.