This morning I noticed that the usual icon that provides me with quick SEO information about certain aspects about the web page I am currently viewing was looking a bit odd. It did take me a while to realise what had happened, but the numbers had increased by one. The number I am talking about is of course the elusive Google Pagerank that people in our business keep name dropping like a celebrity.
This is quite newsworthy mainly because it has been quite some time since the last confirmed Google Pagerank update happened, if memory serves me it was April 2nd 2010 when we had the last update.
Why is Pagerank so important then?
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
The name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.
In other news today!
Continuing a veritable changing of the guard across Silicon Valley this week, Google announced Thursday that co-founder Larry Page will become chief executive of the online search giant, replacing Eric Schmidt in a surprise management shakeup.
The news closely follows Apple’s revelation on Monday that CEO Steve Jobs would go on an indefinite medical leave, with Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook assuming day-to-day control. Also on Thursday, Hewlett-Packard appointed five new directors, including former eBay CEO and gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, as four stepped down.
Page, 37, will move into his new role at the Mountain View technology colossus on April 4, assuming control of the business that he began developing with Sergey Brin when they were Stanford University computer science doctoral students in 1996.
He’s taking the helm at a critical juncture for the company. It continues to deliver blockbuster financial results, as underlined by its fourth-quarter numbers also released Thursday. Meanwhile, it is beefing up staff, gobbling up innovative startups and staying on top of the defining trends in technology, including the fast transition to mobile devices.
For Google this day may probably be one of their most active since they started making headlines over a decade ago. The article above continues by trying to make out that Twitter and Facebook are direct competitors to Google, when they in fact are completely separate services all together. If anything, Twitter and Facebook are competing more about the same internet services than Google ever has with both of them combined.
It looks to be an interesting day with a lot of news to monitor and new SEO strategies to develop.
It’s likely Google will eventually hide PageRank from public and keep it for internal use only.
I think the “secret” is out in far greater detail for them to be able to hide it again. Besides Page Rank has very little impact alone on SEO efforts, I have found that well visited links from low PR sites far exceeds any benefits from high PR, both high visits and low.
Oh yes, well visited sites from relevant location or topics are gold.
The toolbar PR should be used as indicative only. Its likely that their internal PR numbers are changing much more frequently than this.
Different visuals are intriuiging but I don’t think this change has much of an impact on SEO efforts, if at all. Use toolbar PR at your own risk.
As was with my “pun” in the beginning of the post that people tend to name drop PR like a celebrity name. Pagerank is just one of hundreds of factors to consider when performing SEO.
Noticed some updates on my blogs today also..
Congratulations, here’s to the next update and higher Pagerank!
Jim or anyone else, any idea why http://www.digitalswitchover.co.uk remains at PR0 for years? Some PageRank checkers present the PR value as not valid which makes me wonder if something else may be technically wrong …
Hi James,
The reason your website has not improved is because it has very low amount of inbound links.
If you search for “yahoo site explorer” and enter your website, you will see the amount of inbound links. Then try and compare to my website here and see how big the difference is in amount of links.
Do bear in mind that the amount of links does not matter too much, but in this particular case it is one of the many factors Google use to determine value.
Certainly yes! We noticed that early yesterday!
And noticed green bar on our website as well
Check out our blog as well:
http://tech.getinnepal.com/web/google-pagerank-update-jan-2011/
Congratulations on your increased Pagerank. Your main site was however down so I could not see all of it, but the blog was good and to the point.
PageRank has been a standard for a long time, and some wonder has it lost some of its own relevance and importance. I wish Bing and Yahoo would give us a toolbar that measures their respective analytics on a convenient toolbar. I read somewhere that tweets are included in Google searches, and people on Facebook are appearing too on results pages. Facebook has a rank of 10 last time I looks before Christmas. Google are not the only game in town any more, though they are still important.
I remember when everybody was chasing after those pagerank numbers and trying to get links dropped left, right and center. Facebook is certainly a very potent Internet Service, but it is not the same as Google – To give it comparison of just 2 decades ago, then Facebook is equivalent to the local Pub, while Google still was the Phone Book Directory/Yellow Pages.
Thanks for this article! It is interesting for me to know that Google only does a PageRank update every so often. I thought this was done on a more regular basis. In regards to Facebook and Twitter being Google’s main competition I like the fact you pointed out they are actually no in competition at all. I does bother me that small business owners are caught up in this social media buzz. They think of Twitter and Facebook as there new meal ticket to immediate business success. The bottom line is if you are not found on Google you are nobody. Also, search engine have the potential to also drive highly target traffic to your site far beyond any social network.
Until last year Google did somewhat keep the PageRank updates on a regular basis, so this extended time they let it be for must have been some kind of strategy from their side, like not having people build up too many incoming spam links just days before a PR update. Some have pointed out to me that Google may even start ignoring Pagerank completely – although I do not believe that as it is still one of their major “flagship”-inventions.
I did not expect too much in this update since my site is only two months old. Congratulations for your PageRank increase.
Keep at it. The more active and engaging your website is, the quicker you will get that first PageRank. The fastest I managed was 7 weeks after launch, but it DID take a LOT of work.
For PageRank update visit http://www.pagerank-update.info
Noticed my blog’s Page Rank went up by 1. Now listing at number 3 rather than 4. Very pleased! Didn’t realise this was part of a larger Google page rank update. Noticed increased search engine traffic from Google Analytics yesterday. This might explain why.
Getting that traffic is our ultimate goal as SEO, so congrats on moving up in the world (of SERPs
)
congratulations! some of my site/s rankings dipped, according to reports they say that removing the blogroll links help, pagerank juice leaks to them.
True, you can also shape link juice around with the NOFOLLOW attribute. It may be harder to manage on user generated content areas, but something as simple as the blogroll is no worries.
Thank God! the Internet Marketers would get a cool breath because most of them though that Google vanished the concept of PR and its related components! i am much impressed to see great changes of PR transfer in my websites
Yes, after 9 months google has updated page ranks. But i doubt if google page rank has anything to do with SEO?
Since the last PR update was some 9 months before this one, is anyone trying to pretend that the real PR, what ever that is, has stayed static all that time. I think not, so ,it is a big wonder that we get excited by this green bar. OK, it looks good, but that’s af far as it goes. Alexa rating change daily, remarkable there isn’t that much fuss ofver them, or is a question of a simple number?
Alexa is far more unreliable than the Google PR. But all of these are only small components of what the SEO world is all about. The reason for such an “optimistic” cheer at the update was that it had not happened for such a long time and having the PR increased on your projects is sort of a validation for yourself that you really did a good job.
Jim -
Interesting news about Page…funny that he’s two years older than me. “Look, ma, I invented Google…”
“Yeah, right, son…”
The great thing about PageRank for someone in my shoes is pure validation. Just reading and applying SEO and realizing – yeah, I’ve done something right to see an improvement. Seeing as how you can’t officially ‘sell’ PR without incurring some penalty from Google – apart from selling the blog in question or attracting advertisers, it’s not really an indication of merit.
However, a lot of people do take it as such – or evaluate credulity by it, which may or may not be the point. I’ve noticed plenty of folks that I personally trust with no PR – others receive it and deserve it…then there’s me. Still trying to figure it out.
Very nice article and right to the point. I don’t know if this is really the best place to ask but do you folks have any thoughts on where to get some professional writers? Thx