The last time there was a major network change in Google PR was April 2007. This is the longest we’ve ever had to wait to see the PR of a page. Traditionally it was 4 times a year, but over the past few year Google PR came to represent very little to do with the actual quality of a page. Many said it was broken or irrelevant, at least highly inaccurate.

Google PageRank Update is finally underway for the rest of us, and as I thought, it seems Google has brought a bit more “accuracy” to the green pixels with the latest update, as far as I can see. And before you start worrying, for the last few years, PR has been pure vanity, as I’ve said in many posts. It was not an accurate reflection of the quality of a site or the amount of visitors to a site.

Of course Google may be trying to change the whole perception of this much misunderstood metric. Give it back some respect. The Google Page Rank Update seems to include pages up to and including the 2 OCT 2007.

It’s very clear that, even if PR is on it’s last legs, it was still one of the reasons Google became the dominant force on the web, and still a very useful tool in sending messages to site owners about things Google frowns upon (interlinking, paid links). I think a few people have been suckered in to screaming it was a direct assault on only paid links (so often crap quality links) - it was clearly intended to be seen in this way by Google, but I don’t know who was using who in the end!

As you know, We had PageRank all but “worked out”, with a Pagerank 7 site for the last 6 months. Now, that put us on the same pagerank as MSN (UK), so we expected to head south. It looks as though we might be heading for a PR5 in this update.

With the rise of the blogs and social media, it was FAR too easy to gain Pagerank in the last couple of years, probably why we had one of the highest PR in the SEO industry, and even after 10 months we had the same Page Rank as the largest SEO company in Europe (they’ve dropped to 6, by the way).

I was launching sites that within 8 weeks had a PR of 6. I was still aiming for quality links, but it was to easy to spot and get these. Crap sites and blogs had just too high a PR for Pagerank to mean, well anything, although recently Matt Cutts said PR was important to get pages out of the now invisible supplemental index.

If you don’t know what I’m on about, learn more about PageRank here. It’s been obvious to me Google would have to do something to this metric, as it was fast becoming a joke in the online seo community.

While Andy and other respected bloggers was going nuts about the PR update (nice linkbait, Andy) I kept quiet. I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that this was a long time in coming new set of PageRank scores, a response to just how easy it had been to manipulate over the last few years. Basically, to accrue PageRank, all you need is links from other pages that passed a decent amount of PR. It was too easy to spot these.

When we launched Hobo in April 2006 I knew a high PR would give us some sort of kudos in our field so I went for it - I’m a on-page seo but I am a wannabee link ninja - and got it way too easy. We don’t sell links or anything and I don’t believe any of my sites have a link farm profile, so I expected this shift and on the whole I think, from my highly qualatitve analysis, that the new PR is a more accurate representation of “most sites” I m looking at.

A university site I built has a PR 7 still, while other test sites I built seem to have taken a bit of a hit, because of a more “manufactured” link profile, I suspect.

But there are some irregularities in some of the sites I monitor. If it stays this way, it’s obvious it’s still possible to manipulate PR in some way. No doubt the update will take a few weeks to complete.

If you want, you can check the Google PageRank Update as it happens on multiple DCs.

On the whole, quite happy with the update. Seem a bit more accurate to me - PR does not factor in any way how I earn an income - not sure if accurate is the right word though. We’ll see if this new PR score has any weight in determining more important Google factors like ranking and traffic levels. I doubt it but who knows.

With a bit of luck we’ll all get less spam emails from people with PR3 and 4 sites now looking for a reciprocal link based only on the page rank of a page - crazy people.

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