Over the weekend Google has Exported their page rank (PR) information for the world to see. This seems to have caused a stir with a lot of people but made other people very happy, Some users of smaller sites that didn’t have a PR are now reporting a jump to a page rank of 2 or 3 which is great. At the other end of the scale allot of sites that had good page rank of 8 / 9 /10 have reported that they have now dropped in pagerank.
Some of the biggest names in the computing industry with very powerful web presences have had PR rank of 10 reduced and some more than others, For example Apple computers had 6 pages in their website that had a page rank of 10 and all of these pages have been reduced to a 9, the pages reduced had a combined back link total of 2.4 million back links. Other websites that have had their PR of 10 reduced include Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, NASA, Keio University which has had a PR of 10 since April 2004 (which is the oldest list I can find), the biggest drop from a page rank of 10 was Statcounter.com which has dropped from a PR of 10 to PR 6!
Now what most people want to know is why this is? Google have algorithms to work out Page Ranks which is kept a secret from the outside world. The main theory being thrown around is that Google have made quite a significant change to this algorithm which has effected allot of people. From the results I have seen it seems that Google have now implemented a shift in page ranks meaning they have tried to make the PR score more realistic to the page. This could be why pages that had really high PR which might have been overinflated now have a more realistic PR. In Short it means Google looks to have tried to level the playing field.
This is concerning for people that have lost PR but if Google decide to do this which it looks like they have, then there is not very much you can do about it as a webmaster or owner of a website. My advice would be to not worry about it, if its happened to you then it has also happened to Millions of other website owners all over the world. Don’t give up hope, keep up your good work and keep your content fresh and remember that unless this has effected your search engine rankings then it’s only really a problem if you sell links as the link broker will have probably quoted you a figure based upon your websites pagerank.
Gary
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation|No Comments »
The blogging community has been rocking the past few days with news of many of the Internet’s biggest, brightest and best blog sites being hit with what appears to be a PR penalty. Sites have dropped PageRank quicker than Gary Glitter dropped fans in the wake of what many bloggers believe is some Google imposed penalty.
But is it really a penalty from Google? I mean, yes sites have dropped in PageRank, including Just Search (we’ve gone from a PR6 to a PR5) but it hasn’t had any detrimental effect on SERPs. Indeed, while bloggers are rightly concerned that their little green bars are slightly less green in much the same way as the Incredible Hulk is when he’s on the comedown, they have accepted the fact that visible toolbar PR isn’t quite the be all and end all it once was.
No one appears to be losing listings, so what does it all mean and why was it done?
Popular theories circulating around the net include:
Google has penalised website that have removed Adsense code.
Well I can say with some degree of certainty that this is not the case. I personally have sites crammed full of Adsense, and as my last blog showed, make Google a fair amount of revenue in that department, yet my sites have still been docked a bit of green. It’s not Adsense related.
Google has penalised sites for selling links.
Sites like www.johnchow.com sell links, and he’s been knocked some PR. Google is against selling links, we all know that. They’ve made it very clear the last few months. However, again I have many sites that don’t sell links, indeed Just Search doesn’t sell links, yet again our green has been depleted by daddy Google.
Google is cracking down on sites that cross link on the same IP.
Ah, now I must confess I do this a little bit. I have started to split it up lately and am running 3 different servers on different IP addresses, so any linking between sites of my own couldn’t be tracked in this way. I do still have some sites on the same IP linking to each other though, so perhaps this could be a valid reason?
I won’t dispute that cross linking could be a factor, but to be honest I think it’s more likely that there are simply more websites out there. PR is relative between sites, the more sites there are, the more links you’d require to be sufficiently better ‘kitted up’ to achieve a higher PR than the next site. Consequently there’s been some continental plate shifting in Google Earth’s crust, causing sites to be re-evaluated.
I think the conspiracy theories of Google manually going round all of the Internet’s most successful blogs and handing out some PageRank SmackDown! might be a little farfetched.
How has your website faired in this latest shake-up? Whether you’ve gone green or not, remember that the PR isn’t the goal, it’s a means to an end. However many links you have, what your PR is or indeed where you rank in Google for different phrases are means to an end. What truly matters is how much traffic you’re getting, is that traffic converting and are you making sales?
If the answer to those questions is a resounding positive then forget about your little green bar. You’ll be just fine.
Darren
Affiliate Marketing
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation|No Comments »
