Google Update 4/30/07

Today as I was working on my PC I noticed one of my web sites had dropped in PageRank. I didn't think much of it as sometimes the PageRank on a web page will fluctuate. But as I showed one of my sites to someone I noticed it too had dropped in PageRank! A PageRank Update is in full effect.

For those of you who may not know about it, Google periodically updates the PageRank that the public will see in the Google Toolbar and other places (PageRank Checkers). Back just a year or so ago it was around every month or two but has changed to every 2 or 3 or 4 months for a complete update.

Regardless of the timeframe of the public update, it's important to know that Google PageRank is constantly updating in real time, however we don't always get to see that ourselves until they do the "public update".

So what does all of this mean? Well, for one it means that we can see PageRank on our newer sites and also see what progress we've made on our older established sites.

Unfortunately today - it appears that there is an "internet wide" global drop in PageRank. In other words, MANY web sites (not all) have gotten their updated toolbar display of PageRank and have seen a drop of 1 PageRank point (on a scale of 1 to 10 - 10 being best). While I am happy to say many of my sites stayed the same - several of them have dropped and a few of them that should have zoomed up high stayed the same.

In fact almost every site that I have documented was down on average 1 or 2 points!

OK, I'm starting to feel better as it is APPARENT that just about everyone on the web has had a drop in PageRank. NOT EVERYBODY but almost every site I have looked at.

This UPDATE has a global DOWN TREND. At least that's what I think.... I've talked to a few others and they believe I am right. Their sites have dropped too.

What this means is that something GLOBALLY has changed in Google's calculations.

It may be temporary, and it is certainly possible they will make another adjustment, but it seems like something that affects a lot of sites has changed. It could be an algo change. It could be a few MASSIVELY POPULAR sites no longer pass PageRank. It could be that they've found a new way to penalize web sites. It could be that there are TOO MANY MORE sites in the Google database and as such the average value of a page's PageRank has dropped...

WHO KNOWS! Nobody knows! BUT get ready for a lot of speculation as all our favorite gurus will no doubt be telling us why this has happened. Frankly I don't think that's possible as Google is tight lipped and rarely ever spills the reason why things happen.

I will say however that in my many years of experience, this is the single largest DROP in PageRank I have ever experienced. On my sites and on other people's sites... this drop is significant. So what! What does this really mean? NOTHING REALLY! BUT people will try to make it have meaning. For example - those who do not have sites with high PageRank will use this to try and diminish the importance of sites who do have higher PageRank. After all it's not very impressive to have a site with PageRank 3 or 4 and now an awful lot of PageRank 4 and 5 sites have dropped.

So do those sites and those pages have any less value? NO! They still have value RELATIVE to other pages on the net. Only problem is that we have seen a global drop so maybe a PageRank 4 is the new 5. PageRank 5 is the new 6. I don't know! I am just speculating!

It will be interesting to see what happens. Because now the people who will get hurt the most are the web sites that have been selling HIGH PAGERANK text links for inflated high prices. They can no longer charge big bucks if a PageRank 8 drops to 6... or a 6 drops to 4 etc. Sooo... that brings up another SEO conspiracy theory...

Maybe Google did this on purpose to burst the bubble of those that are selling text links??? It is possible. In fact Google has made it publicly known that they are going after sites that sell text links and are aggressively trying to figure out how to penalize them. Maybe this is their easy solution of ruining businesses based on the PR of a page???

But then again - take what I say with a grain of salt as well as all the other RUMORS you'll be hearing. There is no definitive answer yet and possibly never will be.

The good news is - IF you have any sites that stayed at the same PageRank despite this global downtrend - you know that you have a powerful site. Me, I have one PageRank 6 that stayed the same. Surely it deserved to be a PageRank 7 (it was not that long ago) but hey - at this point I am happy it is still a 6.

So - should you be concerned with this PageRank thing??? Well, yes and no... don't lose sleep over it - but be aware that the more you have of it - relative to what other people have - the easier time you'll have ranking on more competitive keyword phrases. The "long tail phrases" in general are unaffected by PageRank as very few webmasters target these longer phrases. BUT if you are going after super competitive phrases like "internet marketing" or "search engine optimization" it is extremely important that you have very high PageRank to get ahead of the thousands of other webmasters actively trying to be on top for those phrases.

I think the bottom line message I would like to deliver is - while it does have importance - you should not obsess over how much PR your pages have. As long as you have lots of good high quality text links containing the words you want to rank on, you should do well. Get as many as you can from pages with high PageRank, but now more than ever, we need to take all the links we can get and not discriminate against pages that only have PR 3 or 4... Sure - more PR on the page is better - but you can do other things to make your links count more - such as matching the TITLES of the pages your links are on with the LINK TEXT pointing at your URL. This tactic works regardless of PageRank... sure it may work better if the page has high PR but let's face it - very few webmasters are doing this secret technique. I'd say less than 1% of the so-called SEO experts know about this trick.

So, it's still important to care about your links, but maybe be concerned a bit more with the overall quality than simply the PageRank of the page.