April 2, 2010 was the day Google completed its last major toolbar Pagerank update. Historically toolbar pagerank was updated every 4 to 6 months but now 8 months have passed and many members of the SEO community are wondering if / when it will be updated again. The concerns over the next update are interesting only because it shows how many webmasters still don't understand that pagerank itself doesn't matter, its the sum of its components that do matter.
Pagerank for better or worse is still the leading indicator for the bulk of tasks and evaluations performed by online marketers. Everyone wants high pr links and when they find them, they often ignore everything else about a page. Getting high pr links on unrelated pages full of links to bad neighborhoods is not going to benefit your site, in fact it could have the opposite effect.
Having a high pr does not guarantee that your site will rank well. A pr 4 site doesn't have a 33 percent better chance of ranking than a pr 3 and pagerank is just one of the 200 ranking factors that Google uses to determine its results.
A site's score doesn't include on page optimization or other external factors that could help or hurt your rank. It's simply a relative score based on the authority of pages that link to a site and if the question is whether authority links are still relevant then the answer is a resounding yes. However if the question is whether or not you should evaluate a site based on a single number, the answer is a resounding no.
For more information about search engine optimization, visit Fahrenheit Marketing. They are a full service marketing company that works with a variety of companies in Austin, TX.
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