PageRank Flashback:

• Google used to use the PR of a site to determine its position in search results.
• It was one of the major ranking factors for a website.
• Obtaining links from pages with a higher PR were seen as a way to earn higher PR yourself.
• It was easy to manipulate the PR of a web page by earning paid links from high PR sites.

PageRank in 2013:

• PageRank is now one of 200 ranking factors that Google uses to determine a page’s popularity.
• It is no longer a determining factor for a web page’s search rankings in Google, however, your site’s position in the SERPs can be affected indirectly by the PR of the pages linking to you.
• Links with higher PR are still important to improve a  page’s authority, but the links must be relevant. A link from a website with PR 10, but an unrelated topic, does not enhance your website’s position in the SERPs.
• Earning high PR links in an unnatural way can risk penalty and loss of your own PR.

• The calculation of a PR is inaccurate and biased in some cases. The simple example to illustrate this is that pages such as Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are as popular as Google, however, their PR ranges from 8 to 9 while Google’s PR is 10.
• If you check the PR of websites in the first page of Google search results you will find many sites with lower PR’s on the top and sites with higher PR’s toward the bottom. This may be in part due to the Caffeine update released by Google, which resulted in fresh, unranked content being able to feature in the top of search results.
• Under the latest Google updates (Panda and Penguin), newer search algorithms using social signals, user generated content and fresh content are dominating the ranking signals, leaving PR as less important.
• Google removed PR from its Webmaster Tools some years ago.

• PageRank is still one of the 200-odd ranking signals Google uses.
• If two websites have very similar quality content, on-page SEO, and in/outbound links – but different PR’s – the site with a higher PR will appear higher in search results. This is a good example of PR giving you an edge over your competitors.
• Although fresh content (with no PageRank) can rank high since Google released the Caffeine (Freshness) update, after a period of time this content will fall in search position and be replaced by content that has links from high PR sites.
• High PR backlinks still matter if they are relevant and natural.
• Guest bloggers usually prefer writing for sites with a high PR.
• Once you get a high PR, people will want to link to you more often. Earning more popularity on the web will increase your search engine ranking so that you appear at the top of the SERPs for your target keywords. In this way PR can indirectly affect search ranking.

Things That Can Lead to a Loss of PR: