Google’s PageRank is one of the most controversial concepts of the Internet, ever since it first saw the light in 1998. Named after Larry Page, the concept was as innovative as the search engine that promoted it, as it struck a nerve in most webmasters with it’s complicated simplicity.

The PageRank was developed as an indicator of a site’s importance, from a Google perspective. While complicated to compute, it serves simple cold results, generally accepted these days as important by most webmasters. But what’s it’s relevance for SEO? Is there one?

Yes and no.

In Google’s own words, it represents Google’s view of a website’s importance. Also, it’s considered to be a factor in computing the SERP of a website for a certain keyword. Also in Google’s words, it should not be taken into account too much by webmasters.

The truth is that at one time, PageRank was an important tool. Over the years though, webmasters around the world used it as a price benchmark when trying to buy and sell links, make link exchanges, etc. Since all these things happen in a nontransparent way, Google had a hard time dealing with it, so they lowered it’s importance in SERP computing to the point of irrelevant. Still, there is a persistemt hype about it, people wait with anxiety their Google report card, every few months, when Google makes the PR update.

So should you be concerned about PageRank?

Simple answer - No. Not from a SEO point of view. It will not affect your rankings. Test it for yourself, you’ll see a lot of low rank websites in high positions for a lot of keywords. The trouble is, a lot of time the way the PageRank is calculated uses the same concept of calculating the SERP position, so for a SEO Expert it represents an indicator to the quality of your site’s IBLs and content, besides your SERP position. Hence the confusion that surrounds the concept. Also, you should be concerned if your website lives from selling links, as it will attract buyers. Other than that, it’s just an obsolete tool, that even Google is unsure how to use. On the one hand, it strikes into the web democracy and free link generation that Google’s algorithm relies on, by providing a simple indicator for link buyers and exchangers, but on the other hand it’s Google’s baby, one of it’s trademarks.

My 2 cents in all of this is that we did not see the last of this. For the moment it’s only an indicator, as far as I’ve seen it does not affect rankings in any visible way. Who knows what the future will bring?