OMG! A Page Rank Update?

It looks like it, smells like it, being reported as it, so… must be it! lol

A PAGE RANK UPDATE!! =:0

Only took, what, 9 months since the last April 2nd Update? I really was beginning to believe we had seen the last of PR, but even though Google tells us not to pay attention to it, they give us another bone.

Not confirmed yet however. http://googlepagerankupdate.com/

And like the guys over at Search Engine Round Table asked… did it make you happy, sad, excited, bewildered, ready to throw the computer out the window? 😉

Well, I will say that I am in the bewildered zone. I mean, I have SO much PR pointing at this domain that it should of been no less then a PR5!! But know, it went from a PR2 to a stinken PR3!?! WHAT THE?

And in all other cases most of my either stayed the same or lost PR, but that was expected as links shift around and I this is the only site I purposely did some PR sculpting.

How did it effect you?

Do you think PR is calculated the same?

Or any insights at all?

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25 thoughts on “OMG! A Page Rank Update?”

  2. One thing you might want to look at is Stanford’s TrustRank, and how google is using it in the algorithm to place greater weight from not just high PR sites, but verified, validated sources.

  3. I am very curious to what others are saying about the theory that having pr 5, 6, and 7 backlinks pointing to your site will increase your page rank. I have man very high pr’s pointing to my domain and my homepage still did not
    budge. All of my inner pages got a nice bump but I am thinking that the ‘high pr to lower pr’ increases the lower pr is just a theory and has been possibly proven wrong?

    Also, the site had continuous everyday linking and multi diversity along with those high pr’s.

    And, I’d like to add that these high pr links did not give a bump in the serps as expected.

  4. My site had the PR adjusted last June so, for me, it has been 7 months.

    Google tells you to ignore PR for search indexing, not for a measurement of authority and as a cue for frequency of Google bot visits.

    The Mayday update changed the PageRank algo considerably.
    Mayday changed the PR algo from one of a strictly mathematical computation to one based on relevance.

    It seems that only relevance between linking and linked pages counts.
    The PR of the linking DOMAIN might also factor in.

    When my site’s PR was adjusted in June it went from a PR0 to a PR4 in one jump.
    At the time I had 115 links, (as reported by my web stat software).
    1 link was on a PR3 page.
    1 Link on a PR5 page and 113 links on PR0 pages.
    All the PR0 page links were 100% relevant.

    Another clue to the calculation of PR is that my PR3 website has well over 500 links and the new PR4 had only 115.

    best,
    Reg
    nbs-seo.com

  5. I also noticed that in testing;

    The site that had very nice on page seo on it was given
    more of a pr then the other without and both had very close or equal to links being built, age, etc…

  6. First off, I hope you are both feeling better.

    Secondly, I LOVE the fact that you shut down over the holidays. I do the same thing and everyone truly appreciates it.

    And lastly, I moved up in PR also. Went from 2 to 3! And that’s with a site that is less than 2 years old.

    But what I like more than anything is that, even though I have a few competitors that kill me in PR (a 4 and a 5), the traffic that I am getting is of much higher quality than they are getting. They may be getting more hits, but when I compare the value of that organic traffic using SEMRush, I’m beating them all out…hah…and it feels so good!

    Thanks! 🙂

    Michael M, Esquire (I don’t know what “Esquire” means, but it sounds cool!)

  7. @ Reg,

    Theory:

    1 PR7 Link Does not carry the pr value weight of
    50 PR0 Relevant Links?

    And if this is true, then would this lead to a second theory that relevance is good for PR but not necessarily a must for SERP ranking?

  8. I find this all very interesting.

    @cornersoned, it use to be that a link from a PR5 site that had less then say 5 links, would make all 5 of the sites that are getting the links a PR5, even with just that ONE line, then of course, the more links out bound from the PR5 site, the more diluted the page rank it would deliver. And, I’m not smart enough to know what the exact mathematical equation is even thought I have read it about 50 times! lol

    @Reg, relevance playing a part of PR? hmmm, I don’t know if I buy that one as I sure don’t believe relevance plays a part in ranking. I just have to much proof to the contrary. But interesting! lol

  9. While page rank (PR) may sound like an exact science, it is only so for the keyword(s) that Google interprets your site’s page as seeking. Google usually misses the boat on that, unless we are very careful in the way in which we construct the keyword anchor text for a particular keyword or key phrase.

    If we craft a home page for “blue widgets,” but also want to quality for “red widgets,” we may discover a high PR based upon blue widgets, yet our red widgets SERP may be higher because we are better optimized for that than the competition.

    Many wise SEO experts suggest that we ignore PR, not because PR is entirely irrelevant, but because it may not be relevant to what it is that we truly hope for ranking.

    Thus, maybe the methods that you used to hope to raise PR may have emphasized different phrases than those that Google has as its primary descriptor for that page (home page or other).

    Remember this: PR refers to a page, not to a site. Thus, maybe the links you received were from a PR 0 page within a site that has a PR 6 home page. Many people are scammed into believing that you have a PR 6 link that is really PR 0 if it an internal link. You can quickly increase PR of that page by directing some links to that page via article marketing (my specialty) or other methods, but unless you do something, it is still a PR 0 link.

    I have many pages that are ranked on the first page of Google even though the home page has a rank of 0 to 3. You need to look specifically at the keywords/key phrases for with you hope to rank. PR is little more than a tie-breaker.

    I know how to get you a high PR, as long as you don’t care about whether it brings in any traffic. On the other hand, I can bring you traffic as long as you don’t care about PR. The combination of the two is what is difficult, although it may not be difficult for your niche.

    PR counts only if you know that you are driving it to a primary (profitable key phrase) or you know how to drive links to an internal page via those related key phrases.

    In any case, PR should not be your first concern. Let profit from other traffic allow you to build PR.

    Greg
    gsport11@yahoo.com

  12. I’m new around here, but happy to report that my blog site went from 0 to 2 with this update and it is less than a year old.

    In reviewing my links yesterday I was dismayed to find very few high PR referring links and realized that I had succeed in getting lots of links from PR0 interior pages from sites where the home page had higher PR, but had very few links from actual high PR pages.

    I think that for the next few months I’ll be doing more manual commenting on threads on high PR pages (like this one) and back off the automated tools for a bit. The best links I have are from blog comments with an active thread.

  13. How did you get my email address ? I don’t recall ever seeing your name, or subscribing – how ?

  15. > Why does Google tell us not to worry about
    PageRank, ignore it for 9 months and then throw
    us a bone?!?

    To keep you using the toolbar… They need you to for data collection. If they turn it off or take it out they will probably lose a large number of webmasters who still think it’s highly important or not 3 months (minimum) out dated.

    > All of my inner pages got a nice bump but I am thinking that the ‘high pr to lower pr’ increases the lower pr is just a theory and has been possibly proven wrong?

    No, PR is exponential (basically) so if 10 links from a PR 1 page gives you a PR 1 you need 100 of those for 2… It’s entirely possibly a PR 7 link took you from 4.39 to 4.49, still a 4 in the toolbar.

    > And, I’d like to add that these high pr links did not give a bump in the serps as expected.

    It’s not as important as it used to be: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/03/google_research_head_norvig_on_pagerank/

    It’s also been reconfigured since the original, which was a ‘random surfer’ model… It’s now an ‘average surfer’ model (or something to that effect).

    The calculations have been changed and the importance dropped significantly…

    > 1 PR7 Link Does not carry the pr value weight of
    50 PR0 Relevant Links?

    PR weight? Sure it does… Ranking weight? Nope… Topicality and relevance of links trump overall PR any day.

  16. Oh, as far as some of the drops in PR are concerned it could be partly due to nofollow links… They used to pass additional weight to pages linked with ‘follow’ links, now they don’t pass weight, but do not increase the weight passed either.

    EG If a page had 10 links and passed 1 ‘point’ through each link when they were ‘follow’ links, previously if 5 of the links were nofollowed the 5 ‘follow’ links would pass 2 points each… It was like there were only 5 links on the page.

    It doesn’t work that way any more…

    If 10 links on the page = 1 ‘point’ passed each and 7 of them are nofollowed only 3 total points are passed (1 point each) to the ‘follow’ links. The ‘extra’ PR that would have been passed previously disappears into cyberspace.

  17. @Andrea, welcome!
    @Why, you had to register for get on my list, if you don’t want to be a part of the conversation, then please unsubscribe
    @eShorten, VERY GOODm thanks! Do you have citation on the nofollow stuff? My previous is Matt Cutts saying they were no longer adhering to the nofollow attribute.

  19. “So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? […] Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each […] More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.”

    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

  20. I read that the Big G are going to be working to reduce spam sites like link farms etc. This will inevitably have had an effect on some peoples PR.

    However if you follow Dori’s advice you wont have been affected to much, negatively anyway.

    Dori, going back to basics your PR only being 3 is not a major issue, what I would do is check Googles view of your i/b links, from there you could roughly calculate

    “No, PR is exponential (basically) so if 10 links from a PR 1 page gives you a PR 1 you need 100 of those for 2… It’s entirely possibly a PR 7 link took you from 4.39 to 4.49, still a 4 in the toolbar.” from eshortens comment!

    your PR. If they are widely different, don’t worry, check your actual serps positions they are what count after all!!

    I am no way an expert in SEO but as no one else has mentioned this I thought I would.

  22. It’s interesting. I went from total sites of 4 PR 4, 7 PR 3, 49 PR 2, 40 PR 1 to:
    76 PR 1,
    67 PR 2,
    26 PR 3,
    15 PR 4, and
    2 PR 5
    this time around. And that’s just the sites I track. Who says backlinks don’t work?

  23. I am interested by THE PR stuff and I did notice a PR update on my home page from 0 to 1. My biggest issue is keeping and maintaining page 1 and preferably 1 to 5 top spots for local in multiple cities but the same state. I gain here and I lose there. It has became a vicious cycle and I cannot seem to just nail it down to the floor for all of the keyword variations I am using.

    What I keep hearing is ranking for a few keyword phrases on your primary (keyword) and blend it up on your link building. I can honestly say It is really Ebb and Flow even with a great deal of continual link building.

    Well mine is as I said city and county mixed and I have lots of local listings to back up my anchor text. I do not think PR is a big deal, it is just a piece of the pie, It is relevant but not the be all end all of SEO, Especially Local SEO.

  25. I’m LOLing at myself for not learning anything these past two years. I posted my thoughts on PR and how my site had fared, and then I didn’t even fill out my registration correctly in order to get a good backlink to my site. Ahhhh!!

    Humbly Yours,
    Mike M (aka std testing from this point onward)