tools PageRank is GONE - Now What?

Google has been hinting for some time that toolbar Page Rank is going away for good. This past weekend they made good on their promises. If you use any pagerank checking tools, expect to see a 0 or an error for page rank values, including fake pagerank checks.



I found a couple of sites yesterday which looked like they had some values cached, but over time those numbers will become less and less meaningful. When it was pulled, toolbar page rank was already getting pretty funky around the edges, as it hadn't been updated in about 2-3 years.

So Google doesn't use PageRank any more?

Nope - they are. They're just not sharing it with you.

Google has always had 2 kinds of "page rank":

• The public "toolbar" kind which we all know and love
• An internal, more precise "secret sauce" version

Public "toolbar" page rank metrics were just a simplified snapshot of the site's importance based upon links to the site. In its heyday it was updated roughly every 3 months. It was helpful in quickly assessing a site (or domain) as long as you realized its limitations. Especially that 3 month window.

Google's internal page rank is a more precise and complex value which is updated constantly in real time. This "secret sauce" value isn't going away - they just won't be sharing the dumbed-down public version any more.

Why did they get rid if it?

• Because it had become pretty useless since they stopped updating it!
• They stopped updating it because it had a long history of abuse.

Despite Google's good intentions, an entire industry developed around the buying and selling of links for page rank, leading to an epidemic of precisely the kind of "unnatural linking" which Google hates. The lack of real-time updates opened a window of opportunity for scammers.

What are the alternatives?

Tools which used to display page rank will probably replace it with one or more of the other major link metric API's - MOZ, Majestic or Ahrefs - if they haven't already. Similar to PageRank, all three assign values based quantity and quality of backlinks, but each uses their own index and proprietary formula.

MOZ DA / PA - MOZ Domain Authority and the URL equivalent, Page Authority, are based on several factors including link popularity,link trust and age. It's meant to be an assessment of how easily the site / page would rank. The scale is logorithmic from 0 to 100, which means it's easier to go from 20 to 30 than from 30 to 40.

MOZ api access has tiered pricing. You can access 25,000 rows of data per month for free, with a $50 surcharge for each 10,000 additional rows. Paid plans start at $500/month. It's a good metric, but of the three major link research platforms, MOZ has the smallest and shallowest index. When it comes to data, size matters.

Majestic TF/CF (Trust Flow / Citation Flow) - Unlike MOZ and Ahrefs, Majestic splits their metrics into to two separate values instead of combining data into one.

• Trust flow represents the number of clicks away a domain is from a set of highly-trusted sites (like the Kevin Bacon degrees of separation game.)
• Citation Flow is a measurement of the number of citations to the URL or domain.

The ratio of TF to CF is important - a high citation flow and a low trust flow can indicate a lot of spammy links.

Majetic's API is only available to users of their Platinum and Enterprise plans, which start at around $400/month.

Ahrefs Domain Rating and URl Rating - Like MOZ's Domain Authority and Page Authority, they are based on the quantity and quality of backlinks to the domain and to the URL respectively. Ahrefs also has Global Rank, which you can think of as being like a link-based Alexa ranking.

AHrefs API subscriptions start around $500/month, but small sites may be able to get smaller amounts of data for less through OpenApp access via an Ahrefs partner.

Ahrefs and Majestic index sizes are comparable, but its important to note that they will not always have the same data due to differences in their crawl patterns and their metrics will differ due to differences in their ranking algorithms.

So what can I use to check out domains, post Page Rank?

Since metrics from Google's all-inclusive index are no longer available, I'd gravitate towards tools which display metrics from all 3 sources mentioned above and compare, keeping in mind that the data may not be in all indices - especially for smaller sites/domains.

If you want to research domains away from the prying eyes of 3rd party sites:

• Sign up for a free MOZ account and get an API key
• Buy a copy of Scrapebox for a one-time fee of $97 ($57 or less if you score a coupon)
• Download the Page Authority Addon and have at it

You can access up to 25,000 rows per month for free. If you go over your 25K allotment, you're charged $50/each additional 10,000 rows, so use it wisely.