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As a search engine optimisation programmer, part of my role is to follow any changes in the industry 7 days a week. And over the weekend it is appearing that we are in the process of a toolbar PageRank update. Over the weekend we have noticed sites which were previously a PR4 drop down to a PR0 and back up to a PR5 again. One of the biggest indications in my opinion is a PR 0 site jumping up the listings to a PR 4 like one of our clients www.bestloans.co.uk who’s site has only been live about 6 weeks, however a second site which has only been live two weeks www.ivahelp.co.uk unfortunately missed the update.

Why a toolbar PageRank update – and not a PageRank update?
PageRank is a constantly updating thing, every time Google discovers a new link to your website, notices a link has been removed, it caches the link – and pretty much as soon as this process occurs the real PageRank is updated, However with the toolbar there is a 3-4 monthly data export, with a number of minor updates within the interim period.
Why not just link the toolbar to Googles storage engines

In reality PageRank is not a value between 1 and 10, it is a value between slightly above 0 and billions. When Google performs an export, it calculates a toolbar PR10 website to be the one with the highest real PageRank, and works its way down through levels. As a much simplified example, look at the table below:

Whilst this is not definitive, as a link from a PR10 page to your PR0 page will give you a very high PageRank, due to it passing on its PageRank, alternatively the same 1 link from another PR0 page will not give you any real PR advantage.

And now to the reason, it simply would take too much processing time to calculate what a pages current PR is, in relation to the rest of the web every single time a PR is requested. This would cause a huge amount of CPU overhead, taking away this available time away from the search engine and Google. This would always cause constant fluctuations due to the ever changing number of links between websites.

Nathan Hall
SEO Programmer

Firstly link building can be broken into two sides, domain links which refers to links pointed directly to your www.domain.com and deep linking which is about links to inner pages of your website.

When carrying out links it is useful to think of the anchor text being used and what keywords you are focusing to which pages.

So what effect does this have if you are changing your website page names?

Your domain links will not be effected as your actual domain name will not be changing, the concern is the “deep links” because if your pages are going to redirect (301) to their new equivalent in the near future, then Google and the other search engines will pass this power over but it doesn’t happen instantly.

By holding off your “deep links” until your page names have changed and the redirects are in place you can then start the “deep links” to the new pages which will help get the pages back to their original status quicker and minimise loss of traffic.

If you carry out links to the old page names then the power or status from these links has to go through the process of being recognised by Google and then the status has to pass over from each link to be associated to the new page, this is not effective linking.

Neil Walker
Head of SEO