Finally PageRank is officially killed off after years of confusion

Yes, page rank has long been a dead dodo.  Its a little harsh suggesting PageRank score ruined the web (SearchEnglineLand's lead in) as it was (and is) the cumultative effort of SEOs seeking to leverage search engine algorithms to boost their / clients website rankings.  I think it will be interesting to see whether content marketing survives in its current form over the next few years.  The volume of content being created in an effort to boost search rankings is simply building a vast volume of (mostly) average and sub-standard information, with little ROI and little prospect of attracting customers. At some point people will realise for the most part they are putting the metaphorical cart before the horse and actually start pruning, focusing and improving their quality of their content, but I don't think the point has sunk in for most marketers yet.

Agree, there is a lot of churn. I think it's more growing pains as the web evolves. Social Media still confuses most business owners who use it for link dumping and self promo.

The kids left Facebook long ago, ever since their parents and grandparents joined, pushing up the age of the average posters, but most business pages are still left having to boost pages to get any real interaction. Google plus seems to have become a confusing content dead end since it's recent re-brand and splitting up of business pages. 

The Google SERPs seem to change on a nearly daily basis as organic content battles for place with ever changing sponsor ads and maps listings.

The freemium model is slowly dying as adblockers take hold, which in turn may have a positive side affect of a reduction in content as unprofitable sites will close down. Will be another interesting year, but I think we will look back at 2016 and see it was an important evolutionary one for search and digital marketing.

Yes, I agree Steve.  For any business considering whether to invest in social media as a means of promotion it's worth reading this post on the merits of various social media platforms for business by Avinash Kaushik.  For those who don't know the name, Avinash is a web analytics expert, and former Google employee. Most SMEs don't have a fraction of the following of major brands so bearing in mind the ability to scale up your 'social-voice' its a tough nut to crack and achieve any form of ROI.

Avinash is a legend, learnt a lot of analytics tricks from his blog.

Not visited his blog for a while, and what a superb article. Good to see we have a similar conclusion about Google Plus, don't worry about it  (at least for now)

The Facebook study is fascinating and enlightening.

If you insist on publishing content on your Facebook page…
1. Solve for See and Care intent (entertain, provide utility).
2. MAKE SURE you buy advertising from Facebook to "boost your posts".
Organically you'll reach a couple percent usually, to reach rest of your Likers pay to boost your posts.

So he concurs with the fact you need to boost posts to generate engagement, but I do like the amplification metric:

Amplification Rate (AmR) is the ratio of shares (or retweets or repins etc.) per post to overall Followers (or Page Likes). Is what you are saying so incredible and of value that I'll stamp my brand on it and forward it to everyone I know?

So if no one shares your post, then no one thought highly enough of it to show someone else, or have it shared on their branded page. If no one comments or likes, then pretty much you are wasting your time, which is money, so do something else!

Then his thoughts on Twitter:

Should your business be on Twitter?

No.

To the point! But his argument that if Nike and Coke can't generate substantial interaction versus time, effort and budget, is quite a powerful one.

Certainly food for thought!

This time PR is really dead however this website provides a very good record of the last PageRank - pr.eyedomain com

The only reason I didn't delete this post as link bait spam is simply why???? 

What possible use or point is an archive (incomplete by the way) of a public tool that has long been dead and serves little purpose? 10/10 for managing to squeeze some more mileage out of the Pagerank debate, but it's long been irrelevant.

Or is it just nothing more than low grade link bait for eyedomain com?