Google Pagerank – Toolbar Update April 2010
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo) -Google has updated it’s toolbar pagerank ‘scores’ for web pages – I see it on internal page 2 weeks old. To be honest I don’t use Toolbar pagerank as more than an at-a-glance metric, and I’ve long assumed while real pagerank is important to get as many of your USEFUL pages into Google’s main index, that’s about it. Pages with a lot of pagerank dont rank any better – they just rank.
Some recent analysis I carried out seemed to suggest Google pagerank wasn’t a factor in ranking at all (other than get you “in”) and I actually had my pagerank toolbar turned off for the last 3 months – which was quite liberating and forces you to look at other factors when looking at links.
I did however see a pagerank penalty for a network of sites (I don’t own but was using for ranking ability) – I believe SEOIdiot might have been screwing about with too lol. That’s private stuff though 
The trusted network in question WAS NOT following Google’s advice about selling links on their site and Google have obviously responded by lowering their toolbar PR (probably in case the network was using pagerank as a selling tool). As I said I wasn’t using the network for toolbar pagerank.
The sites where trusted and the types of redirects they where using where transferring real pagerank & ranking ability from a trusted site to even brand new sites. On the surface the site looked as if it was following Google’s advice, but it wasn’t blocking the outbound banners they had sold using either nofollow or robots.txt, which was a nice side effect of buying sitewide banners on their sites. Tsk tsk.
We've recently updated our comments policy and increased the number of comments a visitor has to make to get seo friendly links in comment signatures to reward long term readers and make it a bit harder for dofollow spammers ;) - I told you dofollow spamming wasn't a long term strategy....
It seems there has been a sudden increase in link networks which allows a person to post an article which then gets posted on number of blogs which are part of that network. From the few reports I have got from few friends, they do seem to work but not sure how much long they will last their ranking ability.
I used to dwell way too much over Google toolbars page rank, but with a mixture of Hobo’s positive messaging and seeing a brand new site with no traffic get a page rank 4 I’ve reassessed my priorities.
I can’t imagine why someone would pay for a link just so they could get that pr4, 5, or 6 on the toolbar. Most average casual web surfers don’t even know it exists or what it is. Sure it might help serps in some cases, but it’s just a number. Some people spend more time chasing those big numbers than they do working on their site. Many of the blogs and other sites I have seen go pr5+ aren’t that great. Some are even littered with adsense and other ads to the point that you can barely navigate or find anything on the particular site.
Nobody can prove anything
is the page rank update finished, as when checking ours it stayed the same?
Steve
Some of my clients were eagerly expecting this update so they thought they can get to higher places just with their pagerank. Some of them went to pr4-5 from pr0 yet didnt move up a notch… I was thinking about it for a while and i guess it’s now official that PageRank is not as important as it was when linking
P.S.: Shaun that story reminds me of the well known directory that google banned for supposedly “selling PageRank”
Can’t recall the name
Your own sites PR doesn`t matter, but what when it comes to linking out? Is a link from a PR5 page (not site) worth more than a link from a PR0 page or not? And what about links from related sites? I dont know if this is even possible to answer, but would for example a PR1 link from a site in the same niche as your site be more worth than a PR5 link from a site in another niche?
Really hope you can answer this.
Thanks.
I saw using seo status plugin for firefox, that my site also got updated hehe, but not all parts of the world can see it at the same time
Also, don’t know, how often Google updates PR ??
I’ve seen a lot of brand new sites jump from 0 to 4/5 and it just looks suspicious to me I’ll be interested to see if this sticks or distributes throughout the rest of the site.
I prefer to base a linking campaign around relevance and a mix of links from high and low pr’s directories, article submissions, link baits and good old fashioned contacting the webmaster. The sooner clients stop obsessing about PR the better, fortunately all of our clients have gone up this update.
I never use PR as a ranking factor it is more a vanity thing that you have a high PR and only in really competitive industries necessary to compete.
A little late in commenting here (my RSS readers is packed, so getting through it all takes some time. lol).
But wanted to concur with your statement here about PR…
I have two websites that I popped TextLinkAds on a year or two back; one was at least a PR 4 (minimum to feature TLA on) and the other was a 4 or 5.
Slowly, as each PR update came around, they tended to drop one spot until now they are both PR0.
But interestingly – and aside from the fact I still have TLAs displaying on those sites – is that even though they dropped in PR, their KW rankings on Google haven’t changed much at all.
One of the site’s internal pages still ranks #3 out of 110,000,000 results for a two-word ‘phrase’ related to ecommerce, just like it did before.
But having said that, the income from TLA is pretty minimum, so I’ll likely remove them from those websites soon and use the space for something else that Google likes better.
Steve I see this as the most common use of toolbar pagerank by Google – dropping it for suspected paid links (sitewides to unrelated sites etc)…. this is happening to a few of my sites too (a reduction in google pagerank with no apparent ranking penalty).