October 2007 Pagerank Update Underway
October 27th, 2007
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
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7 Comments Add your own
1. Klaus | November 7th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Hi Duckman,
Very interested to read your comments. My 3 sites survived the PR change well (5/4/0 -> 5/4/4), but my AdSense income has tanked down to 20% of what is was before… BUT, the Page Impressions are the same but the clicks, CRR, eCPM and earnings are all down to ~20% of 3 weeks ago.
What I don’t understand is that the Page Impressions are still the same …
Klaus
Sydney
2. theDuck | November 7th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Hi Klaus –
Glad to hear you did well in the PR update!
I doubt your tanking adsense income has anything to do with the PR adjustment, though. More likely is this – with adsense, people can specifically ask to display their ads on your site.
I’ve had people do that before – if that ad happens to be appealing to your readers, the CTR will be quite high. The conversion rate for the advertiser, however, might not be quite so high.
As a result, after some time the advertiser pulls their ad to advertise on other sites and your apparent eCPM falls.
That’s just one possibility I can think of.
Cheers,
doc
3. Klaus | November 7th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Hmmm… could be,,,
I just discovered something worrying: In Google Webmaster tools 2 weeks ago I ranked # 9 for keyword “skype”, this week it is # 219 … WHAT is going on???
K
4. Donny | December 24th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Hoping for another PR update soon as our site was in server transition during the last one.
5. Rosti Zacharias | July 29th, 2008 at 11:16 am
To the Duck..
Found your info trawling the Google site. Left a question on the Google Public forum, but cannot find my own question, let alone a reply.
Interested in ways to ensure the data I keep on a database on my server gets indexed, without being seen by Google as trying to something the underhanded way.
Any idea?
6. Page Rank | January 30th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
We noticed the change on some of our sites too. You win some, you lose some. Thanks for the update.
7. Mike | October 14th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Yes, but its time for next pr update. It is expected that next pr update will occurs in month of October 2009. Hope it will brings good news to website owners…..
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