Google to drop the use of PageRank

What would you do if Google's PageRank disappeared from the Google toolbar? If you have a website or practice some sort of basic SEO, you would probably panic. A Google employee hinted at just that in October 2009. Since then Google has only updated PageRank twice on the toolbar, the last time in April 2010. It would not surprise me in the least that Google might remove the page rank part of the algorithm to their search engine.

Now I have some thoughts on PR:

• If Google did remove all reference to PR, how many companies, that broker link selling would go belly up?
• How many blog owners that currently make money selling links would have to find real jobs or learn real online marketing?
• What method would webmasters use to show others that their website is worth advertising on? Would it be pure traffic, Alexa rating or something else?

If you had a new website or blog and did not know anything about how to get your site noticed you might resort to hiring a SEO company. For example, if you sold wholesale apparel, that company (SEO) would have to try and get your company ranked high for those words "wholesale apparel" to show up high in internet searches so your website would get noticed. Normally the SEO company would try and get high PR ranked websites to link to your website, but if PR is taken out of the picture then most small SEO companies would not know what to do. They have based their entire methods on linking and not telling their clients that Google wants good content. You see, in fact, Google wants content and its search has changed because of it.

Around April-May, Google released Caffeine into the world wide web. At the same time Matt Cutts made a few videos that stated that Google will be actively searching the web for unique content. So now you have the real clue as to what is going on with Google, they don't want linking as much as content, unique content at that. So bye-bye paid linking, bye-bye link farms, and good riddance to websites that are nothing more than a few paragraphs set up for Adsense only. Who knows what might be next, maybe real quality websites!!!