PageRank Q2 2008: Silent February update & Webmasters Central

by multippt on February 29, 2008

 Yet another PageRank update

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

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Squeaky June 4, 2008 at 4:03 am

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..

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