Google PageRank Gets Shaken Up, But Not to Worry

by Scott Allen

No PageRank. On Wednesday morning, the SEO world woke up to some dramatic losses in PageRank. Many high-traffic sites got hit the hardest. Search engine marketing experts are speculating on exactly what happened, and many agree that Google either made some algorithm changes or did hand edits for a large number of highly visible sites. Educated guesses on the reason for penalties range from selling paid links, to using interlinking blog networks to inflate PageRank, to miscellaneous other violations of Google webmaster guidelines.

Today, Google rolled out PageRank updates for the rest of the web. This week, sites gained and lost PageRank, but hopefully web site owners can see that the world hasn’t come to an end. As usual, rankings remained unaffected.

To clarify, for this post, when we use the term PageRank, we’re talking about Toolbar PageRank, which the green bar you see in the Google Toolbar, and is a snapshot from one point in time of Google’s internal PageRank measurement. Google’s internal measurement is constantly being updated whereas the Toolbar PageRank is only exported every 3-6 months.

Historically, PageRank has been highly overrated. Experienced SEO’s know that it is merely one of the factors in the algorithm, and that its significance has been shrinking over the years. This week, hopefully that changed in the mind of many site owners, as they saw that their rankings remained solid even the the green bar shrunk a couple of notches in some cases, and increases in others.

A well-optimized site can rank extremely well even with a low PageRank, and a site with a PageRank of 10 may not rank at all for a term. So, it’s important not to get overly focused on the little green bar, rather to put your efforts into creating an overall SEO strategy that works for your specific site and industry.

Note:
If you would like a more comprehensive metric for measuring your site’s search engine success, SEOmoz has created a great tool called Page Strength. It measures a number of factors outside of PageRank, although it does include it. Some of these factors include number of backlinks, domain age, .edu and .gov backlinks, Alexa Rank, domain visibility, Technorati links, del.icio.us links, DMOZ links, Wikipedia links, etc.

More Info on the Google PageRank Shakeup:

Tags:
seo | pagerank | WebGeek