Real Estate Blogging

Days into the aftermath of Google's webwide PageRank readjustment, website publishers are still reeling.

Many bloggers are claiming that Google has punished them because their "PR" value decreased. When their websites used to be PR6, they're now PR5. When they used to be PR4, they are now PR2.

I contend that there's no reason to be alarmed. You haven't been penalized! It's a readjustment of their toolbar.

The PageRank meter on the Google toolbar is not the "real" PageRank. It's an abbreviation of the real PageRank.

That is, the PageRank value that Google uses to determine a website's popularity is a number several digits in length. You never see this number, and you'll never know the real PageRank of your website. The Google toolbar, however, will show you an abbreviated form of this number, in form of a single-digit number.

So, the "real" PageRank value of your website hasn't decreased. All that Google did was recalibrate the toolbar meter, so that it's more meaningful.

Consider this. Each day, thousands of more websites debut on the Internet. Each day, the top 100 most popular websites gain thousands of more inbound links. As time goes on, the PageRank of these websites are so high, that the Google toolbar can no longer provide a meaningful expression of PageRank.

So what Google did was redefine what differentiates a PR1 from a PR2, and so on. But underlying PageRank value, that is the "real" PageRank value, wasn't devalued as a result. It's still the same, assuming your inbound links haven't changed.

So to answer the question in the title of this article, "No" PageRank is not overrated. It continues to be the heart of Google's algorithm.