Google Page Rank Update

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

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