Sun 13 Jan 2008
Google PageRank Update 9, 10, 11 & 12 January 2008
Posted by Shaun AndersonGoogle Page Rank Update Confirmation - January 2008 - See also PR Update April 2008
It’s clear there has been another Google Page Rank Update over the last few days, with pages on the Hobo site being updated. The cut - off for the last pages to acquire Page Rank seems to be the last week in December 2007. I don’t normally agree a PR update is in progress until I see it on sites I monitor - and it is clearly visible.
I certainly don’t give two hoots about Google PR these days, and neither should you, either. It’s ‘an indication’ of the quality of a site some time ago, but there are better indicators.

Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specialising in results-driven search engine marketing, website design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. First sourced at Search Engine Land
What Is My Pagerank?
Well, it depends. On which DC (data centre). During an update it takes time for Google to roll out Page Rank. Thats why i prefer to use an online tool that will query multiple DC at the same time.
Google Page Rank FAQs Jan 2007
- The fast way to lose PR is to openly sell links on your website. This is now officially against Google Webmaster Guidelines for inclusion.
- At the moment, the only tangible effect when Google penalizes a site, is a reduction of visible Toolbar PR. Many sites that openly manipulated Google SERPS via paid revue blogging and link-selling had their Google PR dramatically reduced in the last quarter of 2007 in Google’s opening salvo in the “war on paid links‘, or so Google would have us believe.
- Toolbar PR has little or no effect on amount of visitors Google will send you - believe me. Perhaps this is why bloggers who had PR devalued reported no loss of visitors from Google.
- Many believe Google can’t find all paid links, and are using the Google Toolbar to spread FUD,
- If you install the Google Toolbar you will see a green indicator in your Internet Explorer / Firefox toolbar showing you the Google Page Rank of the page. Hovering over the green bar will give you a number which is the page’s Google Page Rank.
- It’s accepted that the Green Toolbar Version of Page Rank is more than a few months out of date.
- Google Toolbar / DC PR is not an accurate representation of your current Real Page Rank and now that Google openly manipulates what you see, the integrity of the toolbar PR is very questionable indeed.
- Think of Google Toolbar PR as ‘an indication of the PR of what your site might have been last month’.
- To get a higher Page Rank for your domain, you need to get a lot of other pages with PR to link to you. I used an analogy to visualize Google PR, and used this same Google Heat analogy to get a PR 7 site until PR was apparently reduced within the SEO community, and this site fell to PR 5.
- Page Rank flows, and so can be manipulated, channeled, blocked (with NoFollow) and screwed up. My Google Heat article explains how you can channel PR around a site. Just substitute “Heat” for “PR”.
- Remember sites don’t have Google Page Rank, pages do. That’s why it’s possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than the home page. The way a page gets Google Page Rank is from links to it and that’s the only way of improving Google Page Rank. IBLs (incoming backlinks) from high Google Page Rank pages can give you more Google Page Rank “Juice” than links from low Google Page Rank pages. There is one other factor at play. The Google Page Rank they “give” is spread over the number of outgoing links on the pages. You may get more Google Page Rank benefit from a Google Page Rank 3 page with only two outbound links than a Google Page Rank 7 page with hundreds of outbound links.
- Google looks to be rolling out PR changes month to month recently. One thing you can be sure off: When Google revises Google Page Rank the fastest way to discover it is at Digital Point.
- I’ve seen sites go from anywhere from PR 0 to PR 7 in one update.
- One still useful aspect of PR is that when an update happens you can use Toolbar PR to monitor how effectively you have spread potential Google Juice or Google Heat through a site architecture.
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PR and Backlinks are updated. Great!! We are getting good PR and backlinks for our site.
Comment by SEO — January 14, 2008 @ 12:40 pm
That sounds good. The graphic for “Google Pagerank explained” is fantastic.
Comment by Mirco — January 15, 2008 @ 4:51 pm
Yeah it’s great but it’s not mine. It’s Elliance, a cracking image, I first came accross at Search Engine Land, hence the copyright notice..
Comment by Shaun Anderson — January 15, 2008 @ 5:02 pm
I think the hype has died down on pr updates as less blogs are posting about it.
PR as seen from the toolbar is outdated since PR is actually updated everyday. As webmasters we really should not bothered much about the toolbar PR as it does not determine traffic. What we want is keyword rankings, and an increasing PR is a result of a keyword ranking campaign.
The only usage for toolbar PR is to sell text links, other advertisements, and gaining link partners. Though when caught selling links the PR would go down anyway!
Comment by neil strauss — January 16, 2008 @ 2:10 pm
Neil of course you are correct, but there are too many still talking about Google Page Rank to ignore it. Hopefully this post gives a rounded explanation and states I don’t really care for “Toolbar PR”.
Comment by Shaun Anderson — January 16, 2008 @ 2:17 pm
Thanks - this really makes a bit more sense!
Comment by IFA Greenock — January 18, 2008 @ 11:54 am
good article, great tool and great picture, hobo by RSS from now on
Comment by SEO ibiza — February 9, 2008 @ 11:44 pm
I wandered to this site in search for PR update information - seocompany.ca is just not keeping up with the latest updates.
I am really enjoying looking through this site and finding out about your business. I run SearchMasters.co.nz in a very similar fashion to how you run yours - seminars, teaching clients how SEO works, and blog posts about the latest things.
But it sure is hard work keeping the blog posting happening.
Like SEO ibiza, I have now added your RSS feed.
Comment by Michael — February 11, 2008 @ 1:33 am
I don’t agree with you’re statement “I certainly don’t give two hoots about Google PR these days, and neither should you, either.”. I believe that while it’s true that PR scores are outdated, the general principles as they apply to the flow of Page Rank are still important and it is advantageous for any SEO to understand the Page Rank function. For example, if you don’t understand that Page Rank is a recursive funtion, you don’t really understand Page Rank.
Comment by Catfish SEO — February 14, 2008 @ 8:20 pm
I am already tired to get my pagerank moving beyond one. I can see a long way ahead
.. Thanks Shaun, nice work
Comment by Travel Guide — February 18, 2008 @ 3:34 am
@ Catfish thanks for the comment but I think it’s clear what I am saying quoting the whole sentence you pulled that quote from:
“I certainly don’t give two hoots about Google PR these days, and neither should you, either. It’s ‘an indication’ of the quality of a site some time ago, but there are better indicators.”
Google TOOLBAR PR is not to be trusted in my opinion.
Regarding “Page Rank is a recursive function” of course, but that’s a little complicated for the scope of this article, don’t you think?
Comment by Shaun Anderson — February 18, 2008 @ 3:53 am
That pagerank graphic has shed so much light on the pagerank concept. Its really good.
Comment by dolapo — March 8, 2008 @ 6:22 pm
If Pagerank isn’t a ’sign of success’ these days, then the question is what is?
I guess I arrived here partly because of the subject matter, and partly out of curiousity, to see what makes a site rank at this level.
In the end, it would seem that success is more attuned to whether you get the right type of person hitting your site. I can’t see that having a milliion hits is great if none of them are relevant to you.
That seems to me to just use up bandwdth.
Comment by Rob — April 14, 2008 @ 10:52 am
I have also given up on the myth of the page rank as it has never affected our position on Google. We are now seeing a rise in our site through good content and a good site structure.
This seems to working as we are moving up the rankings and our page rank is still the same as it was 2 years ago.
Another thing not to get obsessed about!!
Comment by Media Training — April 17, 2008 @ 2:58 pm
The more I look on this site, the more I find to help with my own site. Even if most of it is beyond me.
Great work.
Comment by Matthew Franklin — April 23, 2008 @ 4:23 pm
Google PageRank Update April 2008
Comment by Shaun — April 29, 2008 @ 7:05 pm
Well loads of information on PR, at last I have couple of my doubts cleared off..A really useful post.
Great Work
Comment by Paintworkz Web Design — May 2, 2008 @ 9:04 am