Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
Rob Watts: Go focus on something that matters You could spend lots of time using tools that use the old pagerank algorithm for calculating scores but it won`t help you improve anything substantially anywhere (IMHO)Here`s a good link from Danny Sullivan written before he joined Google as a spokesman.https://searchengineland.com/rip-google-pagerank...SEARCHENGINELAND.COMRIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the webRIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web
Adam J. Humphreys: There’s no way to know what the PR of a page is. You can see DA and other calculated concepts of what a page is. However Page Rank has officially never been published other than the browser toolbar PR a million years ago which was never the same thing.
Ammon Johns: The patent for PageRank, along with other scientific papers relating to it, detailed it quite thoroughly, and included the process, and, of course, were publicly filed.There were still `secret ingredients`, primarily in things like the seed set, and most particularly in the exact value of the Damping Factor such that even having all the math, it didn`t actually reveal the PageRank as implemented by Google.For several years, Google had a browser toolbar that was available to all, in which one could see a highly simplified and largely estimated scale of PageRank (the scale having values 0-10). However, that only functioned on an estimated basis, and was reliant on the times when Google still had just one central process for calculating PageRank, which resulted in a phenomenon known as the Google Dance (where the values would fluctuate significantly for several days as the reiterative calculations rolled their way through all known links in all known documents).The Toolbar broke, a few years before many SEOs stopped using it, when the calculation process changed to a more distributed method that constantly recalculated PageRank in the background (separate to any of the connected indices) and incrementally fed that forward.Several tools arose that attempted to emulate a similar link crawling and weighting process. MOZ (then SEOmoz) offered `Link Explorer` with a pretty limited crawl, AHREFS crawled faster and further, etc. Although these tools all use much of the basic math that Google have published in the past, they of course have to guess their own damping factors, cannot possibly know which links Google have penalized or devalued, which links are disavowed, etc.However, one tool score is absolutely invaluable to anyone who wants to be good at SEO. DA is an incredibly valuable metric, because it tells you that anyone citing DA hasn`t a clue about SEO, allowing you to safely discard anything else they tell you.
Adam J. Humphreys: Ammon Johns correct DA is a concept based on what we know from said patents. However, I`d be very careful about making blanket statements because you just implied that by my referencing it I`m incompetent. It is a concept of a page`s performance and better than nothing. Don`t tell me you don`t use 3rd party metrics for a perspective of where things are. We all use a variety of tools to consider various variables. I, however, can`t remember going up to anyone and saying oh ya your DA is whatever probably ever.
Ammon Johns: >> It is a concept of a page`s performanceNo. It is not. DA is not a page-level metric of ANY kind.
Tim Capper: So every tool will give you a different metric based on what their developers think play a part - concentrate on your site, forget what tools tell you about PR
Roger Montti: A representation of PageRank used to be shown on Google`s toolbar for Internet Explorer. There was (is?) also another metric that Matt Cutts referred to as Internal PageRank that was a PR representation viewable internally from Google. My understanding is that the toolbar version was a representation of PR extrapolated to ten points on a PageRank meter and that it was as decent a representation as could be done on a one to ten scale for a metric that was more complex than a number from one to ten. It did not predict the ability to rank. For a short time there used to be a Yahoo Rank bar as well from Yahoo.
Zachary Toto: As mentioned, PageRank is an internal metric. It really always has been, but as mentioned above Google had the toolbar which gave an estimate of where you ranked on a scale. They did away with the toolbar but still use the metric internally. If you do proper SEO, pagerank (the metirc) shouldn`t be something you need to worry about. Now, your average position that`s what you should monitor to get a general idea as to where you rank.
So how do people even know what PR a page/site has/had?
