Wow – this is an interesting one.
ProBlogger’s page rank is currently at a 4 – and so is Digital Photography School.
I’d heard blogs had been penalized in their page rank recently for selling text links – bizarre thing is that neither of these two blogs sell links. I’ve never sold text links at DPS and haven’t on ProBlogger for months now – perhaps I was penalized for taking them off!
Both had page ranks of 6 yesterday and previously ProBlogger was a 7. Even jobs.problogger.net has been hit and it’s on a subdomain. Looks like something’s going on over at the Googleplex – is anyone else noticing changes today or did someone over there take offense at something I said? Maybe they don’t like that I took AdSense off ProBlogger (joking).
PS: just noticed Copyblogger is a 4 now too – hmmmm.
Update – Andy Beard and Daniel Scocco are compiling lists of blogs and other sites impacted by this PageRank ‘update’.
Yes, it appears the google machine is doing a shake up, plenty of reports of peopls page-rank going down (not many going up) and suggestions that its penalties realted to selling links, although that hasn’t been backed up by hard facts as yet.
Also noticed that Google is having a real issue with channel reporting over the last day or so, with numbers reported across channels being way off the totals. This again seems to be widespread.
Wondering if the downtime at the weekend has impacted elsewhere on the system. Nothing as yet on the official google blog.
Oh, Shocking news…
But I think PageRank is never a criteria by which to judge a good blog.
Problogger is still one of the standards upon which I judge a good blog :)
Yes, this news is creating a flurry of activity in the forums. Lots of sites have had a downward shift of PR, which makes me suspect that it is just a readjusting of PR standards. May not be as bad as it looks. Think only time will tell. My only wish is that there was more transparency by those at G for webmasters.
Sometimes Google are rubbish. They put splogs at the top of serps, and page rank – well they would be better off stopping it altogether. I’ve been waiting 5 months for a page rank update. It sill says PR0
The new page rank is RSS subscribers – and you do pretty well on that count. – and there’s nothing google can do about that.
I’ve seen lots of blog drop in PR today, oh dear.. is this gonna hurt the blog much?
I wish that Google would just do something already because it has been forever since they last updated and there has been nothing but fluctuations in big websites PR. If they want to get rid of pagerank then just do it, if not, update it.
Sorry to hear. I’m seeing other sites take a hit too. Oops – they did it again.
Isn’t this why Brian C is nudging us towards a different business model?
C’mon, aim higher!
I received this ‘present’ from Google about week ago when my PR dropped from 5 to 4, but the best part is that this PageRank drop doesn’t hurt traffic at all.
While there is no traffic drop on older posts which are main traffic generators I’m starting to notice that new posts are taking lower positions on search results because they are comming now from PR4 blog not PR5.
Interesting.. I haven’t noticed any changes on all of my sites.
But I think you’re onto something.. my sites use AdSense. I think you should put it back on :-) You know, if you don’t make money for Google it won’t make money (or send traffic) for you.
Google must have edited it’s algorithm recently since some new metrics have been introduced like the “link purchases” factor.
I don’t think his has anything to do with taking off google ads though :)
Okay, there are so many bring-downs in PR because of obvious reasons, but has anybody reported an upgrade in PR? That would be interesting to know.
I must being doing something really great to hold my PR then. No drop for me – still unranked :p
LOL @Caroline
What is your first option to check Pagerank through multiple google datacenters?
I’m still the same at the moment too, although I was predicted to go up and that hasn’t happened :(
@ Caroline – go on rub it in ;) I finally got a rank – “0”
About half of the datacenters have problogger.net still with a PR6 and half are showing PR4. I had two PR6 sites drop down to a 5 last week and the same sites are now down to a PR4. Who knows what is going on. In spite of the PR changes, the traffic from Google seems to be pretty much unchanged.
Some of the datacenters show old PR and some show the new lower PR.
I dropped from a 5, to a 4, to a 3 now. Even John Chow has dropped, well at least he was expected. But ProBlogger, CopyBlogger, etc…? Hmm…what is Google trying to say?
Darren, perhaps it’s because you tell bloggers that selling links is a good way to make money. Maybe people are telling Google that they’ve been selling links because of you.
My guess is that they are implementing new fuzzy logic to get more relevant serps. Google have earlier talked about getting relevance going again. This might be what they was hunching us about…
Retireat21.com went down from 5 to 4 to PR 3!
But my website http://www.webdesigndev.com which had no content like a week ago, stayed at page rank 4!? And has like 5 back links.
This is mad!
My PR dropped from 6 to 5 recently. Funny how PR has no correlation to Alexa rank, number of visitors, number of subscribers, number of comments, or even number of inlinks.
I think I may be one of the only bloggers who gets depressed seeing only Google hits in my stats. I keep thinking: “where are my regulars? Ah, here’s one.” Googlers hit you for one page and then go away. Whoopdee doo. Hits with 2 pages or more really interest me.
Stop writing for Google.
Yehuda
There is something really strange going on!
Just a couple of days ago my blog dropped from PR4 to a PR3.
Now I double checked when I read your post and now the PR is even down to 2!!!
Any Ideas?
I suppose the real question, Darren is this: How are your Google referrals? Any noticeable change in traffic so far?
Just today the rank on one of my sites dropped from 5 down to a 3. We had a 5 for the past year and a half. I don’t think this is something to worry too much about. If Google is re-adjusting their rank system in order to get rid of cheaters and provide better quality search results… more power to them!
Gosh, I’m really worried about this. Google implemented the PR system and I think that they are just making this a huge loop. Why can’t they just use back the same ol system?
But seriously, the PR issue is a BIG issue as advertisers use it as a benchmark when advertising on your site… although it’s not entirely 100% accurate…
I think you’ve got to bear in mind that your actual pagerank is fluctuating all the time, and if its now dropped to 4, it probably been 4 for quite a while, just not visible to you. Therefore unless you’ve noticed a huge drop in visitors over a reasonable period of time, I’d not pay much attention to it.
My main site has been pagerank 3 for the last four years – it never goes up, never goes down, yet traffic has grown steadily and is now probably 500% higher than it was a couple of years ago. Add to the fact that I seem to have zero backlinks and it makes me wonder what value to place in pagerank at all.
Look like is another Google Dance again. As for me, the pagerank does not affect my traffic at all, so I didn’t put too much effort and attention to it.
Another drop here – from 4 to 3…
Not really a good news, every blog is down, down and down. My blog drop from pr 5 till now, pr 3. http://bloggingsecret.blogspot.com
While http://blogsavvy.net has been updated about twice in the last two years and is still a 6.
Gotta be ad related.
I have experienced that pagerank up and down . Not to worry ‘Darren’. You will get your page rank back .This may take few months. Remember ! I emailed your few time back that my page rank fell down to zero, I was changing my template constantly. Now I got my pagerank back. I am happy now ! I noticed when Google started updating pageranks of all website. Your rank may fall to N/A or above. Keep on blogging bloggers, update your content on regular basis. Your will get pagerank back soon.
PageRank is irrelevant now. It doesn’t affect search engine results. The only people worried about PageRank are those selling links, as it determines the price of those links.
Google are reducing PR on potential link selling sites to stop the trade. I suspect ProBlogger has been put into a potential link selling group.
mine is still showing as pr5 at http://deanhunt.com
I wouldn’t take these changes as gospel just yet. Give it a week and see if there are any changes or official updates.
I’m sorry to hear that the numbers have dropped in ProBlogger-world, but don’t forget that Google definitely doesn’t have the final say in what makes a quality blog…all of us do!
On the flip side, not all blogs have been docked on the PR. My self-improvement blog, which has been *un-ranked* for the past 3-4 months now has a page ranking of 0. I’m not completely giddy about the change, but at least *some* things are improving…
I think this PR-thing is rubbish, mainly the published number. These Google-guys are making fun of us, pushing some buttons and rolling on the floor laughing… One of my most frequently updated and linked blogs dropped from 5 to 4, another sleeping blog kept its 5, without getting any new incoming links. I don’t think that there’s any kind of traceable logic behind this results…
I agree with Sam as I don’t worry about the page rank…just don’t have one yet!
I wonder if the Google page rank shake ups will ever get straightened out? From what I hear it seems like anytime they adjust the formulas, the ranks shake up but readjust fairly quickly. Is that correct?
I’ve dropped from 6 to 4. I do have some paid links, so maybe that’s part of it, but traffic appears unaffected. I also run AdSense.
Thats stupid, This site is much more popular then many higher ranked sites – and that means Google got a problem!
I thought the update was completed last week and I thought my blog will have no chance to grasping some PR since it is still unranked due to the freshness I guess…
Anyway, since Darren has just experienced the Google shake up, I think everything is not over yet, hoping to get something around 3 but nothing is fine with me as well.
I still have this in mind, will Techcrunch’s PR drop?
@ Wayne
As of now Tech crunch is still high at 8 as of this time. I just wonder when will google put some PR at my blog new blog
Oops that’s too bad. I saw Johnchow.com pagerank is dropping too. It was PR6 or something before that.
So here is the real question:
Do you really care about your pagerank?
I don’t
Lets look at your alexa ranking: 2.169
That is pretty high, but do you care about that too?
If you really want the big boys in ads, you need to prove it with real statistics (server logs)
Of course pagerank and alexa are a quick way to measure a blogs popularity. But everyone knows their are not really reliable.
Just my 2 cents.
I think google’s systems is being hacked by your competitor. They try to lower everyone’s pagerank. LOL!
Hey! This is nuts! What the hell Google is? This is unfair! May be you should make a campaign to fight google back.
I dont know guy’s but I think the problem isn’t in selling tla’s i think they are just reorganizing PR’s thats all, why would page with 50 visitors a day have pr 5? and sites like myspace for example 8 or 9 ? thats a big difference.
I think PR should drop on all sites because it’s just over rated somethimes I am not saying for sites like problogger, valuable information lots of things to read and many visitors PR5 or PR6 is ok but I wouldn’t agree for example for PR7 or PR8
I’ve just checked and https://problogger.com still brings up a PR 6 (I checked a few sites).
They did a big PR drop a year or so ago so hopefully it’s all relevant (ie. if your PR blog goes down to 4 but so does every other blog in your niche it’s not that bad)
Where are you guys checking PR? I checked problogger on two sites and it’s still a 6?
I gathered a quick list of big sites that lost PR here:
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-changing-the-pagerank-algorithm/
Looks like its not an update in PR but rather a distribution of penalties. I could be wrong though obviously.
Andy Beard came with the reason: paid links, that we already knew, but also link exchange inside blog networks.
This page went from PR3 to PR0. At the same time it moved from page 5 to page 1 for the search term ‘banana bars’
http://www.silverstall.com/bodyjew/banana_bars.htm
The only conclusion to draw is that PR is even less of a factor with ranking than it ever was.