Google PageRank Mountain

As I posted about earlier, Google updated their PageRank scores within the Google Toolbar yesterday. Some webmasters have noticed that Google.com lowered their own PageRank from a 10 (PR10) to a PageRank of 9 (PR9). While these numbers aren’t as important as they used to be, it’s still an interesting metric. Google has been the most authority website on the planet for as long as I can remember, it was always in the upper echelon of websites in any metric you could find. Now there is one stat you can bring up that doesn’t show Google in the digital elite, and strangely enough that metric is their own. No surprise to most of us, Facebook remains a perfect PR10 website.

Sites that maintain a PageRank of 10 or PR10 as they are called, can be confident that are among the most linked to on the web. While it appears Google’s growth slowed enough to downgrade their PR, it appears Facebook continued to gain enough links to maintain their PR10 status. One thing that most people don’t understand about “losing PageRank”, is that you don’t actually have to lose anything for your PR to drop. It just means you didn’t keep up with the growing nature of the web. Since PageRank is scaled logarithmically, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the same rank over time.

That’s one of the reasons why this is still such a fascinating number for me. In layman’s terms, it will always grow in proportion to the web. To everyone who says that these numbers aren’t relevant at all, I’ll simply ask for a better single number that defines the size and authority of a website in the eyes of Google. Yes even in 2011, even with all your fancy tools and metrics, give me a better number that can be universally understood by any man woman and child? In 30 seconds I can explain what PageRank means to my girlfriend, and she has never built a backlink in her life.

So go ahead and bust out open site explorer, or linking root domains, or how many unique IP’s you have in your backlink profile. Social gurus can talk about Facebook shares, and show you recent SEOmoz data for that one as well. Guess what? It’s still not Google PageRank. Who cares when you go from 500 unique linking domains to 1,000? But lose all your PR overnight, and it might cause you to stop and think for a moment about what happened.

I wonder if the same thing happened over at Google when the first found out they were no longer at PR10. Likely they knew months ago and saw their authority dropping compared to others on the web. Maybe that’s why they are so heavily committed to Social and Daily Deals right now. As Google’s own PageRank declined did they decrease it’s affect in their algorithm to compensate? Just a thought, and one that I’m sure only Larry Page and Sergey “Rank” can know for sure.