PageRank Update In Progress?
Update: I’ve added a question mark to this post because it appears perhaps the PageRank update is NOT in progress. I thought I saw enough signs – a few of my sites have changed, John Chow’s changed too and a couple of blogs were talking about – but perhaps these are just random events and not indicating a full update is in progress. Apologies if I got your hopes up!
It never ceases to amaze me how much attention the budding webmaster and blogger gives to PageRank (if you are new to PageRank, read this explanation – PageRank Explained – Keeping SEO Simple).
In the last month or so I’ve seen some speculation that PageRank is no longer being updated and Google was abandoning it – or at least no longer updating the public display of PageRank on web pages. Given their now famous stance against text link buying to improve search results, it made sense that PageRank could be changed or simply left static, never to update again.
Word on the street is that the latest PageRank update is now occurring, so here we are again, all eagerly awaiting to see what happens to our sites. The speculation of PageRank’s demise will have to wait for another few months or until Google actually says something about it.
In recent times with the advent of services to make money from blogs like Text Link Ads and when selling advertising directly to sponsors, a site’s PageRank plays an important part (along with AlexaRank).
PageRank and AlexaRank are known for being terrible tools to accurately assess a website’s popularity, yet many third party advertising brokering services that bloggers and site owners depend on for a big chunk of their livelihood, rely on these tools for assessing how much money to charge for advertising.
Nothing I do is directly related to increasing my PageRank, but like most Webmasters, I love to see mine increase. I realize that simply because of the act of blogging and marketing a website, you naturally do good things for your PageRank, but the focus is not on whether the little green bar increases or not. You don’t judge your performance on PageRank, it’s just an added benefit.
Like many webmasters, I always look at the PageRank of sites and it definitely impacts my opinion of them. I don’t think it’s an accurate measure, but it gets attention, and in today’s ad driven world wide web – that matters.
So what PageRank score are you expecting after this update?
