The most recent PageRank update sparked some intense discussion in the blogosphere with people like Steve Rubel, John Battelle, Danny Sullivan and Dave McClure joining the conversation.
"Judge me by PageRank" Credit: Blaugh
Danny Sullivan was surprised when the Google PageRank of SEL dropped from 7 to 6 – "Not that it matters, but then again, there’s no good reason for that to have happened." Matt Cutts then pointed to this article by Udi Manber which suggests that Google "made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January" and that may have caused the dip in PageRank.
John Battelle asked Google to either completely drop PageRank or "give us more granularity" so that users know how how that PageRank data is used to "determine value in the Google economy."
Dave McClure made a very intelligent comment saying "if PageRank doesn’t matter, then why is it displayed so prominently in the toolbar?" His reasoning is that if PageRank doesn’t matter, completely remove it from the toolbar but if it matters, then Google should offer more explanation.
Steve sought of agrees that Google PageRank, though imperfect, is still a measure of "online influence" as "it judges you based on links from all kinds of sources, not just people who live in the same fish tank.. Create high quality content that earns links from other quality sources and, over time, your Google Page Rank grows as does your influence and responsibility."
Finally, Vanessa Fox has jumped in with some great insights. She is an ex-Googler and best known for creating the Google Webmaster Central – a tool that has proved so useful for web publishers.
Vanessa says that Google maintains two different PageRanks – one is internal that is computed regularly while the one you see on Google toolbars is the external PageRank that is updated infrequently. So if your current PR is displayed as 5, the actual PR may be 2 or even 7 and you’ll only know this during the next PageRank update cycle.
Vanessa points to a comment by Matt Cutts where he says that PageRank is just one of the 200+ signals Google uses to determine the ranking of a web page in search results.
The PageRank of my Blogger Blog dropped from 7 to 6 in this update but it is something that really doesn’t matter. To quote Vanessa again: "If there’s one thing that PageRank is not, it’s the determination of your Google footprint."
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-pagerank-drop-stop-worrying/4835/
Tags: Archives, google pagerank, google toolbar, seo, Internet
Reader Comments
To add to this, I know of a website that was involved in blatant link exchanges with directories and other low quality blogs and moved from PR- NA to 3 in 4 months flat!!! Moreover without the backing of unique content.
What really goes behind the scenes in googleplex, no one knows.
I agree, either they should remove this entirely or should give us more info. Big advertisers do take this as one of the parameters while deciding ads/rates.
Written by ROW on 10.08.08
I also lost my PR by one. But, I am not disappointed. I feel Google has a valid reason behind not making all the details public. If they make it everything public, then many people with low quality blogs will start playing all kinds of dirty games just for the sake of PR. So, I think Google is doing the right thing.
Written by Prasanna on 10.08.08
Hmmm …. I still wanna know why my PageRank was reduced by a point. :(
Written by Manan on 10.08.08
I totally forgot about that cartoon. :)
Written by Chris Pirillo on 10.08.08
But why they don’t simply drop the PR down? They can say that it does not matter how many time they want but until we’ll see that little bar increasing and decreasing depending from inbound links the PR will continue to modify the web site owners behaviour and the online marketing strategies…
Simply… drop it down no?
Written by Ikaro on 10.08.08
Hi Amit,
Yes, you are correct. My website dropped from PR 3 to 2. It is almost one year back my site PR is 5. I don’t know what is happenning in the googleplex. I am maintaining such a good site, but not able to attain PR. I am not going to think about PR anymore, lets build good traffic.
Written by Krishna on 10.08.08
The PR has been a debate of great discussion among the web publishers for a long time. In my opinion, the idea behind PR was to make it the mirror of a site’s real worth but as we all can see, it has failed in its endeavor. And Google cleverly put it into the so called “one of the 200+ factors that rank a web site. Now, the question is..as the PR importance has clearly gone..why not remove it altogether so that webmasters and others can discuss something more important.
Written by TechPuree on 10.08.08
@Chris Pirillo: I really loved your Blaugh cartoon strips.. sad that they are discontinued now.
Written by labnol on 10.08.08
As read in the Google blog, they cannot shed more light on the PageRank technology and even on the search quality to prevent the abuse and the all due to the competition.
Written by Raj S on 10.09.08
Still I never got a clear answer (not even from Google) – How PageRank is determined?
Written by Professional Lab on 01.01.09
Great but do you know how to check where one blog is nofollow or dofollow? Thanks
Written by Tinh on 02.17.09
@Tinh: It’s simple. Simply right click on any link in firefox and click on properties, check Relation property. For ex your comment link is external nofollow :)
Written by ROW on 02.17.09
I agree. You just don’t know how this pagerank works. And just when you think you figured it out and did everything right….whammy you lost your positioning and ranking. I too think we need google to give us more information and understanding.
Written by lyndas on 03.20.09
Still Nobody knows what is criteria of Google for assigning pagerank. My site pagerank also dropped recently. Home sometime in future google give its explaination.
Written by MWK on 04.29.09