Something that I stopped following a long time ago seems to be making news in the SEO world. Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts said on Matt Cutts Twitter Response that Google won’t be pushing out a new Google Toolbar PageRank update this year.

Neils Bosh posed the question on Twitter if we should expect an update to PageRank before 2014. Matt Cutts responded, “I would be surprised if that happened.”

To be honest, I stopped looking at PageRank almost two years ago. It became a tool that was used to gimmick linkers into thinking that a website was worth linking to. It was never to be considered the end all be all to a site’s worth, and unfortuantely a lot of people made it that way because Google valued heavily on that statistic. Although a few years ago that changed, and people still believed that it continued to show strength/trust of a site even though Google made it a much smaller factor over time.

So is this the end of Google PageRank? I think so, if they’re going to stop updating it, by nature it becomes less reliable with how your site’s trust factor is perceived with Google. The one thing that I do disagree with is that if they’re not going to update it, it should be wiped from all sites on within their index. Especially if a PR5 website is spamming while a PR0 site is doing everything Cutts asks for, yet a person who relies on PageRank will simply overlook it based on value.

It all again goes back to putting the focus on your site, it’s quality, and how well users interact with the information that you have to display. I suppose that’s always going to be the typical response and we might as well get used to it.