Last night, around 11:45pm PST, I started noticing that the PageRank had increased for most of my sites. Or it stayed the same. I haven’t seen the PageRank for any of my sites drop. That’s for sure.
Probably the best part about this PageRank update is that no one is really talking about it. I’m at PubCon in Las Vegas with some of the best SEOs around, and no one has even mentioned it. I’ve been wondering when the day would come where people would lose interest/fascination with PageRank. Are we there yet? Maybe.
With today’s Google PageRank update, I had to dust off a few old Excel docs. Actually, I pretty much check the PageRank for all of my sites every couple of months, so there was no ‘dusting off’ involved. I know, I know. PageRank is dying and/or dead. And it’s Toolbar PageRank, so it’s not even current data. In fact, looking at Toolbar PageRank is a lot like looking into a telescope that is pointed at the center of our universe. Essentially, you are looking back in time. Don’t be surprised if Emmett Brown jumps into view with a flux capacitor, offering to have Mr. Fusion eat all your garbage.
But seriously, I thought I would share the method that I use to visually monitor historical PageRank changes and trends for a set of URLs:
Yeah. I know. It looks like a weird game of Minesweeper (SEO version). But it’s easy to set up, using conditional formatting, and it really helps to quickly identify Toolbar PageRank lottery winners and losers.
Now, do I freak out if some of my sites drop in PR? Not at all. What about the URLs that move up in PageRank? Well, I do take a little joy in that. But overall, I really don’t use this data to make any major SEO decisions. And I wouldn’t recommend using PageRank as a KPI for your SEO campaigns. However, this data can be used for diagnostic purposes if something totally random occurs with your PageRank. For instance, if you see a massive PageRank drop (i.e. PR4 –> PR1), then I recommend you find out why that might have happened, as it could be affecting your overall results.
Let me know if you have any other ways of monitoring PageRank trends. I’d love to hear about them.
Cheers!
PS. I know that ‘-1’ is not a valid PR value. I use ‘-1’ instead of ‘PageRank Unavailable’. It makes it easier to sort. Boom. Roasted.
Well, it looks like Google updated the toolbar PageRank today. And now everyone is going to be checking their sites for PageRank changes. It seems like the last PageRank update was back in early 2010 (April, right?). Ahhh, yes. Those were the days. Pre-caffeine. Pre-MayDay. Pre-Snooki being a New York Times best-selling author (link). Welcome to 2011, Google. Thanks for joining the party. Better late than never. I guess.
Hey! I am sure you are all aware of last week’s PageRank update. Yeah, it happened. And even though Google recently told us to stop concerning ourselves with PR so much, I’m still going to check out how my sites are doing. I dunno. I know Toolbar PR is way old and outdated and such, but I don’t care. Old habits die hard, right?
Is anyone else out there seeing massive increases in the PageRank for their Twitter account(s). I have about 100 accounts, and I’m noticing all sorts of good stuff. Primarily, I am not the owner of several PR5 Twitter accounts. Many of these have only a few status updates, and they are all less than a year old. I mean seriously. I have several PR4 Twitter accounts that only have ~200 followers. That is wild. I’ve done some checks on other domains, but the recent PR update didn’t seem to have any major effects on PR for typical sites. I could be speaking too soon on that one. I guess we’ll hear more about the effects of this PR update in the next few weeks. But really, why am I seeing massive PR increases for Twitter? Does Google really like real-time status updates that much? Anyone need any links from Twitter? 😉
The most recent Google toolbar PR update occurred around May 27th. Last night as I was up to white hat type of stuff, I noticed that many June blogposts already had a toolbar PR > 1. WTF? Had Google already made a PR update again, just one month after the last one? The answer: Yes. My buddy Frank over at Tech Jaws (a badass SEO and internet security blog) sent me a link to the SEO Round Table PR update post that confirms the update.
After checking it out for a few minutes, it looks like the PR update is affecting internal pages moreso than homepages. There’s no way I can check the entire internet to support this claim, but from just looking at a few sites, that’s what I am seeing. However, I have also seen a several homepage PR changes, and the results look to be split. Some of them are up 1 level, some of them are down 1 level, and most of them just stayed the same.
We all know that toolbar PageRank is nothing to go apeshit over, and we also know that Google updates the real PR quite often. Could it be that Google has decided to frequently publish more of their internal PageRank updates? I guess only time will tell.