Pagerank still matter? Maximum page size indexed?

[eeallparts]

I've been out of the loop on Google SEO for a couple of years. A couple questions. Does Pagerank still matter anymore? I know it was never the be all and end all, but 5+ years ago everyone was trying to get at least a couple PR6 backlinks and hopefully get a couple of their pages up to PR6+. I don't know whether that still matters anymore and if it does how much I should care. Most of the pages on a site that I need to work on show no PR because there are virtually no external links.

Another question I have is what is the maximum page size that Google indexes these days? I know that it used to be 100K way back in the day, but I recall that supposedly isn't the case anymore. Beyond user usability is there a certain page size I should try to be keeping under?

I have a site where afaik no SEO has been done in years so I am just trying to get up to speed here and what are the basics of Google SEO today.

[tedster]

It's a long story - the "old school factors" still matter but it's a lot more complicated now, and old school only gets you part way. It's also a lot easier to go too far with merely technical SEO signals and trip an "over-optimization" or webspam penalty:

Here's an recent thread on the topic:
How I Make Sense of Google's Complex Algorithm [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: tedster at 8:03 pm (utc) on May 4, 2012]

[aristotle]

Some months ago I started a thread about how Google treats very long pages. Here is the link:
[webmasterworld.com ]

From my own experiences, my impression is that the Google algorithm likes long pages.

[eeallparts]

I presume that it is still safe to say if content has been truncated from the Google cache that it isn't indexed? Therefore, any page where I have content beyond the end of the cached page I should break up?

[aakk9999]

You can find this easy by serching for a unique part of text from your page (in quotes) from the bottom part of the page that you say is "cut off" from the cached page shown

[tedster]

Very long pages "might" generate weak user signals (incomplete scrolling, for instance - as measured with Chrome user data).

But it takes a MIGHTY long page to cause truncated indexing today. You might end up with too many links on such a page, and that can dilute PR circulation. And if it is real content (especially an article) the semantic focus can become too diffuse for good rankings.

[eeallparts]

It appears that the pages aren't getting fully indexed so yeah it appears I will need to break these pages up a bit.

By "MIGHTY long page" how approximately how long are you looking at? A lot of these pages that appear truncated have 10s of thousands of lines. Would it be beneficial to break up the pages? I figure it would create additional pages that link back to each other and it would avoid the issue of pages getting truncated in the google index. Is there a hard cutoff for page length in the google index? What page size should I be shooting for?

[tedster]

Yep, tens of thousands of lines is way too much for one page. It's also quite user unfriendly and likely to get you a Panda hit at some point.

Look at it like a user instead of looking for a set number of lines. Serve your users well and Google is usually a lot happier with what you offer.