Google is sure quick in updating the new PageRanks — this time 2 months faster than expected (well, the update is just 1 month away from the previous, and the expected cycle is about 3 months). Though, the update is once again… sloppy and probably incomplete. Though, you should be able to see a change in the front page of your site. Sadly, this update also appears to be the opposite of the previous update — chances are inner pages may sometimes be stripped off their PageRank, despite being linked all over the place.
Note that the update is probably not completed, as most sites may not have a change in PageRank. Then again, Google usually dishes out everything within 24 hours. It’s still a hit-and-miss though.
Interestingly, PageRank appears to be going down yet once again this time round, with Google even hitting its OWN pages (iGoogle, anyone?). The great news, is that the new PageRanks now probably comes without a penalty in most cases (unlike that horrid update last year). The fall in PageRank for particular pages shows that Google has changed something somewhere in its algorithm. Even backlinks shown by the inaccurate “link:” command shows a change, though an unusual one since apparently the link count is reduced even further by half.
There are also some unusual PageRanks — particularly high PageRanks given to blogs which have no backlinks (or blogs with mainly exchanged links). Sites which previously have no PageRank originally appears to have their PageRank restored, such as Technorati.
Back on the Google webmasters central, it does seem that Google has got all the backlink counts a lot more less compared to the past. It’s as if Google lost a large chunk of your backlinks, particularly internal links. It’s also pretty unusual that most of the links were stated as being discovered in “February”, despite being actually shown in the Webmasters tools several months ago.
*Certain pages on this site appear to have got nuked by Google. :p
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There was a time when I looked forward to the pr update, but now I cringe when I hear it is about to happen. It really doesn’t make any sense how some sites with few or next to no backlinks got pr3’s and pr4’s last Q2 update. There were sites which lost all of there pr Q1 and regained it back in Q2, and the funny thing is that some of the site owners did nothing to promote or build links. They just let the site sit there to see what Google was going to do.
I did a little homework and from what I can tell it looks like duplicate content is a factor these days. Been spending time configuring some of my site’s robots.txt file hoping that will help things alone. Also, trying different plugins for WordPress to try to manage duplicate content as well. I did find a pretty nice robots.txt checker that you may want to check out at, http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml — I have been looking at some of the big blogs with pr and comparing their robots.txt file to my sites. I think it is helping, but will have to wait till Q3 update to find out..