Why No PageRank Update until now

PageRank hadn’t been updated for some months and Matt Cutts hinted that PageRank “on track to go away a little bit” in a new webmaster help video. In his keynote at PubCon in Las Vegas, Cutts exposed the reason why PageRank hasn’t been updated and why it likely won’t be updated for a while – if ever.

 

Internally, PageRank updates on a daily basis and every so often, Google would push out the PageRank data to the Google toolbar through a pipeline . The reason we haven’t seen a new PageRank update newly is because the PageRank pipeline broke, so while the PageRank data internally continues to update as it should, webmasters eager to get a fresh look at 

PageRank data are out of luck.

Cutts also revealed they do not have anyone at present working on updating the pipeline and confirms we won’t see a PageRank update anytime this year. They are evaluating it to see if they require make a fix to update PageRank publicly next year.

Many webmasters still obsess over PageRank data, but the truth it hasn’t been updating since early this year means that webmasters have been less dependent on using it as an SEO tool of value. While Google continues to update the algorithm and penalize sites, webmasters can’t use it to spot check if a site has been penalized, as they could in years past. 

Fewer users are using the Google toolbar in Internet Explorer. So fewer people are seeing the data at all. There are still a lot of SEO tools that use and display PageRank information for sites and use it as a metric, mainly in tools that are gauging potential link values.

While it isn’t established we will never see a PageRank update ever again, the fact we will only have a single PageRank update in 2013 and Google isn’t working on a pipeline fix makes it less likely PageRank will be updated or a valuable tool for webmasters going forward.