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Google Updates Toolbar PageRank for Many Pages

Courtesy of SearchEngineNews.com | May 2005

Originally Published: May 18, 2005

Around the 22nd of April, Google implemented a long overdue large-scale update of the toolbar PageRank for many sites. You might want to check your PageRank to see if you were affected. Google's backlinks feature (the number of incoming links to your site Google shows when you do a link:www.yoursite.com command) was also updated.

While many sites saw a nice PageRank increase of one or two points, a fair number of heavily over-optimized sites actually saw their PageRank drop significantly, in some cases all the way to PR=0 (zero). This result was largely due to Google's much more aggressive detection of what it sees as artificial links structures.

While it's nice (and a bit of an ego boost) to see your PageRank go up, keep in mind that toolbar PageRank is only a very general indicator of how well your site is going to rank for a given keyword. There are many other factors involved and the site with the highest PageRank does not necessarily always rank the highest.

The point is to not get too caught up in obsessing over your site's PageRank. In general, sites with a higher PageRank will rank better, but not always - and Google itself has said that toolbar PageRank differs from the actual PageRank Google uses to rank a site.

However, should one of your pages that previously enjoyed high PR suddenly drop to PR=0, then THAT can spell trouble - and likely indicates that the page has been assessed a serious penalty for violating one of Google's guidelines.

Planet Ocean Communications
Reprinted by permission from: SearchEngineNews.com

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition.
FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings.

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May 13 2008 10:22 UTC