Google Inside

PageRank™ is part of how Google figures out what to show you in the results pages after submitting a search query. For example, when you search for “American government,” on Google, it will use PageRank as part of the formula to decide which page it’s going to show you as number one or number two, etc.

There has been a lot of chatter among the SEOs and the search industry about whether or not PageRank is here to stay or not. The idea behind PageRank has created a huge market for the search industry. Buying, selling, and marketing text links to manipulate the search results, which is based on PageRank.

There hasn’t been any actual news update on whether or not Google is even seriously considering that they might drop PageRank, but it has been the clamor among everyone lately.

I took a moment and caught up with Adam Lasnik about the issue. He didn’t have a whole lot to say, as I expected, but he did have this to say.

PageRank continues to be one of many important signals for us (and one of over 200 signals, actually!). We’re always refining how we crawl, index, and rank webpages… but I expect PageRank to be around in one form or another for the forseeable future :).

It’s nice to know that Google isn’t wholly dependent on PageRank, but it’s simply one of the many factors of Google search. I do find it slightly ironic how freaked out people can get about PageRank sometimes though. But at the end of the day, I personally do not care all that much about PageRank. I care about search results. PageRank is indeed part of the search results, but it’s the public value of PageRank that people are so worried about.

People need to calm down, focus on content, and the Google search algorithm will do its job just as it has been for the past 10 9 years.