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Three weeks ago, Google conducted a toolbar PageRank update that caught the eyes of most webmasters and SEOs more so than a normal toolbar PR update.
Why? Well, because Google's own PageRank on Google.com was lowered to PR9. Well, today, Google pushed out a PageRank update to fix the problem and Google is back at a PR 10.
The thing is, this update was not related to Google's own PR dropping a point. At least I do not think it is. Because if it was, Google would have pushed out the update the day of this PR update back in June.
So why the urgent update? Was it because webmasters and SEOs were losing trust in PageRank, which I published this morning? Nah - Google doesn't take my stories here that seriously.
Instead it was because, I believe, Twitter's PR was a PR 0 and Google didn't want people to think that Google downgraded Twitter's PageRank manually because of contract deals breaking between the two. Of course, that is my interpretation, maybe a bit exaggerated.
Google sent me a statement minutes ago explaining why Twitter.com's PR was a 0 this morning:
Recently Twitter has been making various changes to its robots.txt file and HTTP status codes. These changes temporarily resulted in unusual url canonicalization for Twitter by our algorithms. The canonical urls have started to settle down, and we've pushed a refresh of the toolbar PageRank data that reflects that. Twitter continues to have high PageRank in Google's index, and this variation was not a penalty.
So Twitter is back at a PR 9:
That is also why I have been getting hundreds of comments, emails, tweets about there being a PageRank after 8am (EDT) today.
Several threads at Google Webmaster Help, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld are discussing the recent update.
So yes, this is an usual update from Google - to update the PageRank values of sites weeks after pushing out a toolbar update. Again, no need to look deeper into it, in my opinion.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.
