Why You Shouldn’t Worry About PageRank

Are you happy about your current page rank? I sure hope so, because PageRank is never going to be updated, ever again! That’s right. Your current PageRank is frozen forever.

If you started your site after November of 2013, your PageRank is and always will be 0. That’s when the last PageRank update took place.

If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably heard somewhere that PageRank is one of the metrics your site will be judged by. And it’s true: some companies and PR firms will still take a look at your PageRank before determining if your blog is worthy enough.

But even Google tells us to stop relying on this metric:

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much. Many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.” (source)

Now for those who don’t know exactly what PageRank is, it’s the first metric Google ever used to determine how important a website is. It’s been a part of Google since its launch in 1998. The algorithm mainly considers how many sites link to your page, and how important those sites are themselves. The more links, and the more high-quality links, the better your rank.

This isn’t to say that links don’t matter. Quite the opposite! Links matter a lot, both for search engines and in terms of growing your site. But because PageRank won’t be updating anymore, you’ll need to rely on other metrics to find out how well your site is doing.

I have two alternatives for you.

1. Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric similar to PageRank, but a lot more popular in the SEO world. The score your site is given varies from 0 to 100, and the higher the better. Go to MOZ.com and type in your website for a full analysis!

2. Ahrefs

You can also take a look at your backlinks yourself. For this, I use ahrefs.com. Just follow the link and enter your website. You’ll see your number of backlinks as well as referring domains (pay closer attention to the second one!). Ahrefs is constantly updated, so it’s a great way to keep track of all the sites that link back to you!

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So if you’ve been waiting for your PageRank to go up, I hope this clears everything up!