Always the masters of misdirection and misinformation, search king Google is now telling webmasters to stop focusing on PageRank! In a recent post on their webmasters forum, here’s what “Google Employee” Susan Moskwa said on the controversial subject:

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.  :-)”

The response comes as Google recently removed PageRank listings from its Webmasters Tools suite.

So what does it mean? It’s anyone’s guess but it seems Google is on campaign to try to get webmasters to de-emphasize PageRank and have them focus elsewhere which is fine.

But I’m still going to say that PR carries with it a good amount of weight in the search algorithm and therefore I’ll still be keeping an eye on the green bar until the day comes when they really remove it.