What Was Once Known As The “Holy Grail” Of SEO Has Changed

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What was once known as the “Holy Grail” of SEO has changed.

Since back in the day, SEOs have used PR (Toolbar Page Rank) to measure a site’s power but it doesn’t work anymore.

In this post we’re going to teach you:

Why PR is going out the door
What is replacing it
How you can use it to your advantage

Google & PR

Google doesn’t give a crap about showing PR anymore and hasn’t updated it since December of 2013.

Obviously, internally they re-calculate it and shift search results every single day.

But toolbar Page Rank (the metric the public can see) hasn’t been updated in 10 months. … And the internet has changed a LOT since then.

Sites that should be a PR 4 still say they are PR 0. They gained lots of authority links, but PR never updated.

And in the same respects, some sites that have PR but lost links still show active PR.

Flat out, toolbar PR isn’t an accurate judgement of link authority anymore.

What was once known as the “Holy Grail” of SEO has changed (Illustration)

How do you judge link / value in 2015?

There are a few ways, but now the de-facto standard has become Moz Domain Authority.

Moz DA is similar to PR in that it shows the “power” of a site by displaying a number. The difference is the PR goes 0 through 10 and DA goes 0-100.

To give you a quick reference of how domain authority compares to PR:

Moz DA 15-20 (Small power, ≈ PR1 or PR2)
Moz DA 20-30 (Medium power, ≈ PR2 or PR3)
Moz DA 30+ (Large power, ≈ PR3 or PR4+)

This isn’t exact, but it can at least give you a guiding reference.

You can check the DA of any site by going to Moz Open Site Explorer here.

There have been lots of 3rd party case studies around the internet confirming this, and in fact you can rank sites with PR0 links (because they are not really PR0, the public PR just hasn’t updated).

So when you’re looking for how to judge how powerful your competition is and what links to get, don’t just look at PR, you need to look at other metrics that are more up to date, like Domain Authority. (Written by Greg, The HOTH)

Thank you for reading What was once known as the “Holy Grail” of SEO has changed, we hope that useful.