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Welcome to the ineedhits Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.

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Tuesday, July 18

Google Is Updating It's Page Rank - Are You Up or Down?

In the search engine world, the Page Rank (PR) measure is closely watched by all those chasing the elusive top positions in Google's search results. PR is one of the critical factors that Google uses to determine its ranking results.

The theory behind PR is quite simple. The more relevant back links a website has, the higher its PR, and accordingly the more importance Google places on its content meaning higher rankings.

Remember, PR and back links alone don't determine the rankings. There is a myriad of other factors that the search engine algorithms use to decide where your website will appear in the SERPs, but they have been recognized as having a significant impact.

So explanations aside, it would appear that Google, the search titan, is updating its dreaded Page Rank and has also exported the latest Back Link counts. Google tends to do these updates/exports periodically . Whether this is a quality control measure (ie avoids their measures being influenced by websites buying bulk links from non relevant sources) or not, it often means that Google's measures remain unchanged for months, even though your site back links might be increasing (or decreasing) within their datacenters.

We like many website owners watch these variables on-going. So when a movement occurs, it encourages us to evaluate our optimization strategy progress.

On discovering the PR update, we did a quick check on our Google Back Link count and discovered that both had been updated simultaneously (not always the case). While we retained our Page Rank and even saw some nice improvements on individual pages, we did notice a drop in our exported back link count.

Does a drop in back link count mean that alarm bells should be ringing? Not necessarily. It does suggest that you should continue to work on your linking strategy as a continued drop in quality backlinks could eventually mean a decline in Page Rank. But remember that you should always look at not only the quantity, but also the quality of your backlinks.

The drop we experienced may be caused by many factors such as websites that link to us having closed, or webmasters changing their sites and links (all variables beyond our control). It has got us motivated to start supplementing the losses with new relevant links to ensure we maintain and improve our Page Rank. At the end of the day, unless your PR is 10, you have scope for improvement.

Now we have blogged extensively on effective link building techniques, so if you would like to kick start your campaign, visit this previous post.

How to Get Good Incoming Links

I would be interested to know how Google's update is impacting your website's Page Rank and published Back Link count. Let us know by leaving a comment!

11 Comments

At 2:44 PM, vladimir allen said...: Hi Rene,

My index page stayed the same, PR3 (note, I just started this site in Sept 2005 and am doing no REAL optimization crappola as of yet).

The web pages that I built using widely searched terms (for the topics related to web design), all pages sport worthless, irrelevant content, rose from PR 0 to PR 4.
These pages are constructed well for eS-Eeeee-Oooooh, however, have no contextual value what-so-ever. Much like the junk, spammy web sites that are now aggressively appearing in positions 1-10 on Google for many sought terms.

The web pages that I built that contain valuable good meat content either remained the same or dropped out. So, I deleted them.

My 2 web sites that remain dormant and have nothing on them rose from PR 0 to PR 2????

Go figure cause I can't.
I honestly don't care where the web site sits with Google. They are a fickled bunch for sure. My key terms are hitting MSN and Yahoo on page 1 positions 1 - 7.

Have a nice day Rene and let's hope Google has another PR boost for irrelevant content~!
Al Toman
At 5:17 PM, nic westby said...: Not noticed any difference yet but I too have no joy at all with google but they list some irrelevant rubbish in front of us on our key searches. Doing great with Yahoo and msn. How can we be page 1 with yahoo but be page 20+ with google. The Yahoo search results show a far greater degree of relevance.
Nick of www.wisemovetospain.com
At 6:35 PM, smartzul said...: I still confius with Google PR because my blog (sorry, in Malay) is top ten in google search when searching using related keyword, but the PR is 0. ;)

I don't know why, but i don't care so much what is my blog PR are. hehe.. :D Maybe google PR just a tools. Or, its have problems? :p

Hope someone can explain something? Or, have the same experience?

Thanks.
At 10:12 PM, Anonymous said...: My blog started at this Feb., and it has a pr of 4 now. I didn't really do any SEO, except the Google Sitemaps.
>smartzul,
Google PR is not a tool, it's a algorithm that Google use to determine where your page will be showing up on a specific query.
>nic westby,
Come on, Yahoo! search is just crap.
At 1:21 PM, huntingc said...: Google PR kills me. Being new to the whole SOE game, it seems they sure make it hard. I have pages with PR2 and they get listed in the top 10 results for keywords. However my index page that links to all the content on my site has PR4 and isn't in the top 50. I just don't get it. Do they even know what they want?
At 7:47 PM, Anonymous said...: My site had PR5 for many years but has now dropped to zero - probably never to be seen again! Other pages in the site have now been given a wide variety of PR rankings which appear to be hardly relevant to their postion in the search engines. I gave up worrying about Google and its algorithym problems a long while ago. The world is not Google -- although Google may think it is!

metalmickey
At 3:38 AM, The Angel said...: Hey,
I started my blog with Blogger since early January 2006. Till early May, I already get PR 4. Now with the new update from Google, it's become 5 now.

Anyway, I have just move my blog with my own domain & hosting www.eeleen.com.

Don'y know whether I be able to achieve the same PR within 6 month like previously :)

~TheAngel~
@ My Life Story
At 8:30 PM, Myrtle Beach said...: I went from # 12 spot to invisible
At 12:11 PM, Bill said...: My PR stayed the same for Costa Rica Adventure Tours search.
Bill Beard
www,billbeardcostarica.com
At 8:48 AM, dOyOuKnOwHoW said...: My PR changed a lot especially after february changes , nearly look like a have to take a loan

troublewithpersonalloan.blogspot.com
At 11:38 AM, abi bakar said...: eer...my PR does not change at all, is Google no more updating its PR for this month?