For those of you that follow your Google PageRank, you might have gotten a good surprise today (or bad, depending…)
Google’s PageRank seems to have updated on the Google Toolbar.
A lot of webmasters and SEO’s follow the Google PageRank indicator in an attempt to visually get a feel for how “healthy” their website is in the Google index.
You can head over to Wikipedia to get an indepth description of Google’s PageRank.
But to summarize, Google PageRank is a ranking system that attributes a number from 0 – 10 to webpages that are indexed in Google.
Any web page that is able to be retrieved by Google in the search results will have a PageRank assigned to it. Some pages are too new to have any PageRank attributed, but that doesn’t mean the page isn’t accounted for in Google – it’s just that Google hasn’t assigned a number to it yet.
For websites that are new, they will typically get a PageRank of “0” (zero). This is because new pages have yet to establish any level of authority, backlinks, or content.
Websites that are old and established, such as Yahoo.com that has a PageRank of 9.
The perspective here is that the higher your PageRank, the stronger your rankings, presence, and authority you have in Google.
That’s why webmasters and SEO’s are always trying to do everything they can to increase their PageRank – more PageRank = more authority!
SEORoundtable.com provided more insight into the PageRank update, plus information about the previous updates:
“There seems to be a Google Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. We have threads on the topic at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum. The update seemed to have started sometime yesterday afternoon and many SEOs and webmasters are chatting about it now.
The last PageRank update prior to this one was in June 2009, which may have just been a technical quirk because the one prior to that was just a month before in May.
In any event, like I say every time:
Yes, a Toolbar PageRank update means nothing in terms of your ranking changing anytime soon. The PageRank scores shown in the toolbar are outdated and have zero direct impact on your Google rankings. That doesn’t mean that PageRank has no influence, but the toolbar score does not have any influence. Google shows us one thing, but yet uses another thing.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum.”