Anyone Still Tracking Google PageRank?

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 01:41 PM PDT

Until a couple of years ago most bloggers and webmasters would track the PageRank of their sites almost religiously, and use it as street cred on most situations. A PR2 or PR3 was average. PR4 or PR5 was pretty good. PR6 was pro level, and anything above that was reserved for the Internet moguls.

Every three months or so Google would also update the nominal PageRank (the one you could see using a toolbar or an online service), and people would go crazy about it. The folks who saw their PR increase would celebrate and brag. The ones who got downgraded would complain bitterly.

Myself included.

I remember one update when this blog got a PR7. As you can imagine I was pretty happy. Too bad it didn’t last long. On the next update it went down to PR6, which I believe is the current PR.

Anyway over the years people started talking less and less about the PageRank of websites, probably because we started to understand that it was just one out of hundreds of factors that affected your search rankings.

In many situations it would be hard to see a correlation at all between PR and search traffic, as we had cases where a site lost most of its PR while its search traffic surged.

The last time I checked the PageRank of any of my sites was probably two years ago, and I don’t see many people talking about it or about PageRank updates either.

So my question: are we finally over the PageRank hysteria? Are you still tracking it? Have you heard about any updates lately? Let me know what you think with a comment below.