The problem with pagerank is that it's exceedingly hard to a/b test. There's multiple factors involved in this but here's a few of the obvious ones: For most s

The problem with pagerank is that it's exceedingly hard to a/b test. There's multiple factors involved in this but here's a few of the obvious ones: For most sites your pagerank is typically determined by your root. (Unless google detects you're a hosting company like blogspot) So if you try to a/b test your leaf pages their pagerank is completely domainated by the root. Pagerank is not that frequently updated. (Depending on how much traffic you have.) There aren't individual and seperate googlebots to test against to seperate pageranks in tests so creating clean tests is very hard because Google very often updates their algorithms. (Try looking up ranking shuffles and you'll see what I mean.. every time there's a shuffle there's a furious scramble to figure out what changed and why and how to counteract it.) Even if you could a/b test would you really want to? For now, a successful business only has to stay slightly ahead of the curve to trounce its competitors. Sure, a/b testing might get you valuable knowledge if your goal is to be an SEO consultant (well, one worth actually paying anyway, a lot of "SEO consultants" in my opinion read a few blog posts a couple of years ago and have been charging for that as gospel ever since) but if you're a company with a product it's probably going to cost you more money than it earns.