Search Engine Journal has a useful post analyzing the latest Google PageRank Update in which they speculate as to why many sites have decreased in their visible PR whilst increasing their backlinks:
‘The most current PageRank update will undoubtedly cause a larger stir than usual in that many sites have shown drops in their visible PageRank while at the same time showing significant increases in their backlinks. This fact reveals that one of three things has occurred in this latest update:
1. Google has raised the bar on PageRank, making it more difficult to attain a high level, or
2. The way they are displaying their backlinks has changed, or
3. The way they calculate the value of an incoming link has changed.’
After looking at my PR across various Google data centers it appears that either the update is “stuck”, they are rolling it back, or something else. Half of the data centers are showing what would appear to be a new PR for one of my sites while the other half of the data centers are showing my old PR.
Even more strange is that another of my sites is showing three different PRs across the data centers. Very weird.
I strongly believe that Google had changed the way they calculate the value of incoming links.
My blog was set up two months ago, and it had 240 backlinks in Google with PR5. However I found a blog that set up before me and has 460 backlinks. It’s PR remains 4.
They have had problems. My blog went from 3 to 4, then back to 3 for a couple of days. Now it’s back to 4, where it seems to have stabilized.
my blog’s PR went from 0 to 4 to 0 and now it’s back at 4…
I started my blog less than 2 months ago so I don’t believe my PR is actually 4.
I use the firefox pagerank checker extension, is there some other way to check your PR?
Can somebody tell me why my http://comicstripblog.com/ got PR6 although nobody is linking to it?
Hey now you say it, just checked my weblog pr and it went from a 0 to 3, just like that.
I’ve been running this one also for about one month. Pretty nice, if it stays that way :)
My page rank has been the same for three months now but I’ve expected a drop because months ago I HEARD that Google announced they would be lowering the value of links found in the comments of blogs as a means of fighting back against comment spammers who use comment features to raise their own page ranks. Is it true? I donno, but I’m glad I didn’t loose my PR.
A couple of thoughts.
1) Your page rank will fluctuate while this goes on. Its not problems or an error. Google has many datacenters and it just takes a while for the new PR information to work its way through all of them. As a side note, the same is true for the actual index and you have no control over which data center you access at any time you do a google search.
2) Google didn’t lower the value of links from blog comments, they introduced a new linking tag which they wouldn’t follow and thus wouldn’t give a link value. I still say that one was a bad idea, but it’s a done deal at this point.
Billy: “I HEARD that Google announced they would be lowering the value of links found in the comments of blogs as a means of fighting back against comment spammers who use comment features to raise their own page ranks.”
Fine point: link=nofollow is wide spread now, does the PR downward changes reflect that? I’ve never had a big number of links in this way, mainly because I comment for fun not as part of a broader strategy (if it was part of a broader strategy I’d need to stop commenting so often here). My PR’s went up across the board. At the end of the day though what counts is the traffic so my advice to others is don’t panic, only panic if your Google traffic stops comming in. To give a short example of the 4 blogs I have that went to PR 6 one is bring in about 50 Google hits a month, the other is doing that in a day, both have a similar amount of content. They have equal PR but one needs more work than the other.
That would be sad if Google did lower the value of blog comment pages because they are legitament links I think. If people spend the time enough to comment on someone’s site, it should be valid to keep as a high value link.
Yes, on the other hand there are plenty of spammers out there, but the blogs that have a lot of spam normally don’t have a lot of PR value in themselves because the owners don’t care about keeping up their blog. I personally have a PR5 on my site, but that’s because I have high valued incoming links and I maintain my blog properly.
It would be best if they found a way to decipher the difference between actual spam links and real links on blogs and/or normal sites.
The PR update didn’t boost my PR at all, but boosted the corporate site I work for, which makes me happy. Went from a PR7 to a PR8 woot =)
Glad to see Comic Strip Blogger’s comment here I’m one of your regular visitors.
I’ve checked your site (http://comicstripblog.com) and found that you have 38 backward links. Though I didn’t look each link, I believe most of those links are good quality. How did I check the number of links? You can type “link:http://yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com” (without quote.) You may type http://www.yourdomain.com instead of yourdomain.com and sometimes it gives you different number. But I don’t use thay way, rather, I personally recommend to use Firefox with SearchStatus extension. If you haven’t used it, I’m sure you’ll appreciate my recommendation.
A few thoughts about PageRank…
It’s mysterious to me. However, having said that, a few myths also exist in clients side.
Goolge sees the number and the quality of the links. So, in some cases, it’s possible that the site that has less number of links can have higher PageRank than the one that has more number of links.
The traffic from Google and PageRank don’t have direct relationship. If I exaggerate, no relationship.
There seems to have been another PR update in two days.
My blog http://labnol.blogspot.com PR was 6 and with the recent PR update, it went down to 5.
But a pleasant surprise, today it is back to 6.
So seems that Google is still working on the PR update.
Hi
how do I find how many backlinks I have? I’ve installed the google bar in IE but I can’t see how to check how many backlinks I have.
Thanks in advance
@Connected: use this format “link:www.yourdomain.com” or “link:yourdomain.com” in Google. or just use PRsearch.net or StatBrain.com services to check them. But in may no accurate during the update process since not every datacenter is updated.
Regarding comicstripblog.com and it’s PR6.
Google doesn’t show all backlinks, so you can’t trust the information from a Google backlink check, to be covering all the facts.
Try entering the following in Yahoo “linkdomain:comicstripblog.com” which will return 274 links to the blog. Then try to visit some of the sites linking to it, and you’ll find that there are at least a couple of PR7 links. These links will give a higher PR than a bunch of PR3 links.
The “linkdomain” command gives you a holistic view of the links to a website. Google’s “link” command only has focus on the exact URL, so it doesn’t give you the holistic view that you actually need to understand a sites PR.
Remember that the amount of links doesn’t have as much impact on your PR as the PR of the sites linking has. But also, remember that more relevant links is often of much more importance while optimizing for specific keywords.
May I know when is the next Google Pagerank Update? thanks!
I think webmasters should get more and more links. PR can go up ver fast. Please look my site http://www.agranews.com to get some idea. Website contents should be updated too.
I try to do best for my site. I am getting better rank of http://www.agranews.com
I hope it will help you.
Good luck
Rajeev
Google Page Rank process is mysterious. I hv been blogging for more than 2 yrs but not much improvement in page rank.
Our page rank was a zero for 2 months. I had to go through my site and remove anylink to a site that I thought google may consider a link directory etc. Finally I am back to a 4.