Google Slipped In A PageRank Update On New Year’s Eve

If you were tied up or hung over on New Year’s Eve and weren’t watching your toolbar (we weren’t) then you might not have noticed that Google updated its toolbar PageRank. Matt Cutts actually Twittered it.

If you’ve got questions about how Google figures its PageRank, Matt’s the guy to ask. It’s rather complicated and he’s actually on the record for saying he doesn’t understand every little nuance either. In a cool little Q&A format, Matt Cutts answers some of those niggling questions we all have about PageRank and its importance. I like one user’s attitude:

viggen says: “Do i need to know that? What does it tell me when i know it? Why would i care? Meaning, what purpose has the Pagerank for the mom and pop site out there?”

And what’s was Matt’s response?

viggen, I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me.

Quite frankly, that’s how we feel too. Many webmasters spend too much time worrying about PageRank. You should just focus on building a quality website and working on getting conversions. It’s not that PageRank isn’t important; it’s just not the most important thing and in terms of relative importance I wouldn’t even put it in the top 10. It’s nice to know information and can be a guide to how your site’s reputation is doing over all, but even then there are better indicators of reputation than PageRank. Still, we all like to know Google does its update. Don’t we?