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We had a Google Toolbar PageRank update last month and noticed that Google.com had a PR of 9, whereas Facebook had a PR of 10.
Over the weekend, many started noticing Twitter had a PR of 0. A clear sign of a bug somewhere, either on Twitter's side or Google's side.
Anyway, I feel like more and more webmasters are trusting Google's PageRank less. Which is mostly a good thing.
I won't get into why it is a good thing, most of my readers heard it a hundred times from me. But why is it a bad thing? Well, PageRank is Google's trust indicator. If users,webmasters and SEOs trust it less, then what does that make PageRank to them or to Google's branding?
A WebmasterWorld thread has one senior member saying, "pagerank scale seems stretchy!" Not sketchy, I know but the user is wondering why the numbers seem off from what he is use to historically, leading to less trust. He said,
A guess - they stretched the pagerank scale. It takes more links of equal value to achieve the same as fewer could before the update. Google.ca had enough pagerank value to equal 8 prior to the update but afterwards that same value is only worth a 7.
What do you think?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
john lewis uk
07/18/2011 01:45 pm
Yes, i don't know whats wrong is going on now a days with Google, either they are doing some new experiments or there is a bug.Mostly web masters already don't care about PR. Now more questions will raised about PR importance. Lets see what happen in coming days. Hoping for the best.
eurostar deals
07/18/2011 01:45 pm
Yes Google PR Loosing trust among webmasters.. Google has also updated page rank again today and some of sites are moving back towards their previous page rank!!
Black Seo Guy
07/18/2011 02:06 pm
I say never put to much into it, because it take more then that number to be someone online..believe me "Black Seo Guy "Signing Off"
TheGuvernor
07/18/2011 02:56 pm
I don't know if it was a pagerank update or bug fix but today the pagerank on one of our sites jumped back up to 6 from 5. With the previous pagerank update a couple weeks ago it had dropped to 5. All of our other sites remained the same. They just don't have anywhere near the age, exposure and branding of the pagerank 6 site. It's pure speculation on my part but it seems they may have stretched the upper numbers and left the lower ones alone.
Roland Hutchinson
07/18/2011 03:09 pm
Ours went down from a 6 to a 5 in last months update, now back up to a 6 today, have seen some other Tech sites increase and decrease as well today.
Zhijun Tan
07/18/2011 07:35 pm
The pr of Google now is 10 again.
eRocket
07/18/2011 09:33 pm
PageRank losing trust amongst Webmasters? What trust were people placing on it in the first place? Publicly visible (toolbar) PR always was an inaccurate and relative measure, and besides, to adapt a popular business idiom, "PageRank is vanity, converting traffic is sanity" :)
Home Remedies MD
07/19/2011 01:00 am
Google Pagerank is losing its trust very fast because there are too many bad websites that have high pagerank that shouldn't
Steven Lockey
07/19/2011 08:34 am
>>But why is it a bad thing? Well, PageRank is Google's trust indicator. If users, webmasters and >>SEOs trust it less, then what does that make PageRank to them or to Google's branding?Eh what? PR an indication of trust? no...... PR is simply a sum of the total value of all links pointing at the page, disregarding relevancy. Its NOTHING to do with the trust level which is a completely separate part of Google's algorithm. Any site can have a huge PR by amassing a shed loads of links, acquiring a high trust rating probably takes far longer and has more opaque requirements.
Maxym Paschenko
07/19/2011 10:13 am
18.07.2011 - update PR
Hiren Vaghela
07/19/2011 11:02 am
Yes i have seen some of the website who have get their PR without any effort. It will good as well as bad for some webmasters. It was given unpredictable result which decrease the trust as well.
Rob Abdul
07/19/2011 11:23 am
When is the Google PR monster going to be put to bed?! It is loooooooong over due.
Gabriel Ryan
07/19/2011 01:07 pm
Thanks for sharing this useful information! Hope that you will continue with the kind of stuff you are doing.
Guest
07/19/2011 01:16 pm
Google.com was PR 10, 4 weeks ago. http://www.naples-fl-real-estate.com/ was PR 1, 4 weeks ago. Google.com was PR 9, 3 weeks ago. http://www.naples-fl-real-estate.com/ was PR 3, 3 weeks ago. Google.com is PR 10, today. http://www.naples-fl-real-estate.com/ is PR 1 today. Yes, Google messed up, offered no apologies, upped their rankings and dropped PR's like mine within 3 weeks. I think the Feds need to look into this!
Rob Abdul
07/19/2011 01:21 pm
Mr. Graham, has the SERPs or the traffic to your site altered in this period of time?
SEO Inverness
07/19/2011 06:06 pm
Today's change doesn't look much like a fix. I now have sites with inner pages that have higher PRs than the homepages even though the inner pages have no backlinks e.g. PR3 homepage PR4 links page with 80 externals????????
Enovabiz
07/20/2011 04:49 am
Personally I don't have much faith in PR since it has got very little to do with actual search rankings. But that said, few days back one of my sites acquired PR4 but then dropped to PR3... Strange are the ways of Google
SEO India
07/20/2011 04:53 am
One more thing to add. We may debunk PR as much as we want but there is a big link trade industry that values a site only on the basis of PR. Any PR updates are keenly watched by them
Rob Abdul
07/20/2011 08:32 am
Well the said trade industry's days are numbered; it is because of this industry abusing PR that the big G has watered down PR.
Hiren Vaghela
07/21/2011 08:56 am
Same thing happen for many webmasters. We can't predict what Big G is do the next.
SEIsrael
07/21/2011 11:42 am
This has been going on for some time now. Most Webmasters or SEOs will tacitly admit that other factors determine their choices for which inbound links they acquire. I just wrote about my list of factors here: http://www.searchengineisrael.com/does-pr-matter-anymore
Webmaster
07/23/2011 05:04 am
My company website http://www.voyagevietnam.net has a Google page rank of 6/10 (in since 2006 then it was kacked and lost the page rank down to 0/10 in 2008) then I tried to solve it for almost more than a year to get back to 5/10 (in 2010) but siddently about 6 weeks ago it downed to 3/10 that make me crazy. I have to try more and more to bring it back to 4/10 now. Since my experienced that if your site owns a high Page rank is good but it is not the most importance. If your clients can find you through keywords they search is the best.
KJ
07/28/2011 02:58 pm
Lol, I look at page rank once every six months or so out of a curiosity like you would get in a museum. The basic webmaster tools are much better indicators of your sites performance, but each to their own. Personally, I would prefer a crappy rank with lots and lots of happy and targeted visitors who don't care about PR. Google is going to remove Page rank from the equation very soon anyway. (+1 anyone?)
KJ
07/28/2011 03:02 pm
Exactly, couldn't agree more Steven, much better to have a few links and good content and you will find Google will reward you with visitors and not page rank. What's better?
Tuan Anh
06/06/2012 04:44 pm
PageRank seemed not a big concern now. Even when I got over 100 unique visitors a day two months ago or now just about 30 my website ( http://www.motorbikevietnam.com) is still the same 3/10. I think the content is a more important now.