Long gone are the times of monthly Google PageRank updates, Google dances, and checking Google data centers - and to be honest, I somewhat miss those days. But the question I see asked a lot is how much have things changed? The answer is a lot has changed but fundamentally nothing has changed.
The reason I bring up this question is because I saw it asked twice today. Once to John Mueller of Google on Twitter and the other time in the Matt Cutts interview.
John said things have changed over the years and he doubts it is the same algorithm it once was and he doubts it is used as it once was back in the old days. Here is John's tweet:
This is based on the old PageRank patent, AFAIK. I wouldn't surprised if there are significant things changed in the meantime. It's still useful as an exercise, but I wouldn't assume that this is 1:1 what's implemented at Google now.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 26, 2018
Of course, this response is kind of around the 302 redirect debate that has been going on for years.
But I love how Matt Cutts talked about the PageRank algorithm stating yea, it probably changed here and there but fundamentally the original concept of PageRank and how Google wants to rank sites has not changed. Google wants to rank the most trusted and respected sites top and PageRank was around figuring out the sites that people vouched for the most.
So yes, it has probably changed a lot but no, fundamentally the end goal is the same here.
Oh, and also for you junkies, check out a recent post by Dixon Jones out of retirement on how PageRank works.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
