It is quite weird for me to notice that a lot of people are currently waiting for a Google Page Rank update, now that Google Penguin 3.0 is officially live. A part of the reasoning seems to be the fact that we had a Toolbar Page Rank update on the 5^th of December 2013.

Some think that a new one will appear this year, around the same date because it is right before the holiday shopping season. We all know that this is when most links are bought in order to basically inflate rankings when people shop like crazy.

The problem with the last Page Rank update was that, according to me and many other SEO specialists, the data used at that update was not actually that up-to-date as it may have seemed. Many that bought links right before that date did not see any improvement in their rank. That was a little weird. The fact that the update may have included data that was not up-to-date can clearly mean that the Page Rank became irrelevant and it was only used as a way to get people to stop buying new links.

Why Doesn’t A Page Rank Update Make Sense?

The truth is that the Page Rank was abused. People used it as the sole way to analyze if a site is successful or not. The difference between a PR 3 and a PR 4 was huge in terms of how much money was paid in order to get a backlink. This was quite interesting because the PR 3 site may have had a higher traffic, a much higher traffic. At the end of the Page Rank craze, rankings were not even mildly related to what Page Rank a site had.

Forget About Page Rank

Without a shadow of a doubt, this is the best thing you can do. There are still people that try to abuse the PR system and take advantage of people that do not know much about this topic. They will tell you that you get better rankings when the page that links to your site is PR X when the truth is that you may not get any benefit and the site may even be penalized if bad work was done in the past.

Use metrics la domain authority or page authority to decide whether a link is valuable or not. Try to see how much traffic a site has to see its audience and NEVER get a backlink, especially paid, if it is not related to your site. It is one of the biggest SEO mistakes you could make.

Image source: The Readers Desk