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For years people have been obsessing over Google PageRank. You might say that it’s the most visible part of SEO.

SEO clients want a higher PageRank for their web sites. SEO professionals boast of (and sell) their ability to get a high PageRank for their clients. Link Brokers build their businesses on the ability to boost a web sites PageRank. Even domain sellers use PageRank as a metric when selling their sites!

All that is about to change. Yesterday (10/14/2009) on the Google Webmaster forum, Google Employee Susan Moskwa said this in reply to someone who noticed that PageRank was no longer showing in Webmaster Tools:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

More information on why you shouldn’t obsess over PageRank can be found here:

This is going to destroy a lot of people. I don’t really mind myself. I stopped paying attention to PageRank a couple of years ago since it seemed silly to me. In SEO you really need to focus on two main things:

1. Building a Web Site that has great content – and follow the basic web page optimization tips found here at seoFool.com
2. Spreading that great content around the internet and getting other people to link to it

Hm, ok that second one does sort of go hand in hand with PageRank….*shrugs* ok so links ARE important…but obsessing over an exact number of links so you can increase your PR from 4 to 5 or 6 is silly. You should just focus on spreading your content as much as you can so that as broad an audience can see it as possible. Focus on the content, not the number of links.

But I digress….what do YOU think about the loss of PageRank in Webmaster Tools and surely soon from the Google Toolbar?

COMMENT BELOW!