The notion that Google PageRank is a key determinant in ranking on the World’s most dominant search engine turns out to be untrue after all. Google just dropped PageRank from its webmaster tools which is something they have been slowing doing for months now. However, its notable that PR is still on the Google Toolbar.

Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa explained “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,” says Moskwa. “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.”

While ranking algorithms have changed with time, Google has slowly been discouraging people from paying too much attention on PR saying that its only a minor tool and just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. For a long time, PR has just been a comfort bed for SEO noobs.

Meanwhile, Google encourages use of its analytic tools conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.