October 2007 Pagerank Update Underway

Hi everyone –

For those of you who follow these things, just letting you know that the October 27 2007 PR (google pagerank update) is now underway.

It’s been a long time coming, and to be honest i thought that it might never come. Showing pagerank (or at least the toolbar version – TBPR) is one of those things that I often think probably serves no real useful purpose to the average webmaster.

It’s really only just basically a measure of how many folks link to you (and how many link to them… recursively) and NOT (unlike what the toolbar PR says when you hover over it) a measure of how important Google thinks your site is – If you want to know that you just need to check out your visitation stats.

I’ll take that further – I think the little green bar probably helps erode the quality of the internet as a whole by encouraging the abuse of the Google algorithm through link exchange / paid links etc.

It’s like crack for webmasters – it causes a kind of ‘PR fixation’ amongst the SEO and webmaster community. I think that’s probably something which is to the detriment of inexperienced webmasters as it tends to sidetrack them from paying more attention to the other aspects of SEO – like writing good content, for instance. Every new webmaster has suffered from that syndrome at some point or another.

I think there are a number of reasons not to worry too much about Pagerank. I described my views about this around the last PR update in April, and I found this informative article about why pagerank isn’t something to worry about too much a while back.

Of course the whole issue does tend to polarise people. Some folks are firmly of the view that PR has ZERO impact upon your position relative to other sites in the search index, whereas others (including me) believe it’s still quite an important measure – simply because it is an effective way to measure popularity algorithmically – and has no really accurtate peer at present. You can see one such holy war regarding pagerank in this thread – in the red corner we have Cass-Hacks, in the blue corner we have dockarl (me).

Anyway, here’s hoping that your PR moved in the right direction – but if it didn’t, do not despair!

Cheers,

doc

7 comments October 27th, 2007