Sunday 24 August 2008

Unexpected PageRank update

Google has done something unexpected and exported new PageRank values only 4 weeks after a major export of values to the Google toolbar. Over on DigitalPoint there's threads talking about how people have noticed new PR values for inner pages on their sites and the odd homepage rank change too.

I don't get the impression this has happened before, or at least not very often. Usually there 3 months between exports.

This export has cleared up one thing that had been confusing me. My Software Product Development blog was saying PR N/A but now it's PR 3. I was expecting it to have a non 0 PR as it turns up in Google searches quite a bit. PR 3 is more than I thought though. I'd kind of given up on this blog after the last PR toolbar export and started removing links from SliQTools. I removed the links 4 weeks ago. I'm not sure whether this means the PR will fall back over the next few weeks.

Unfortunately there are losers too. J's new site has dropped back to PR0 - why this has happened is anyone's guess. I was very surprised that it achieved PR1 at the end of July as it was a new domain. I expected it to take up to 5 months to get a non-0 PR.

by ML

5 comments:

  1. "I´d kind of given up on this blog", the softtester blog?

    Yeah I was quite surprised that I got PR1 too, take a huge hypothetical leap, and taking in what you say about others PR on DigitalPoint, I'm thinking that google screwed up and have not corrected things.

    To be honest I've never thought it was a difficult thing, to get PR 3 at least. I kind of seems obvious to me that the work you put in to your page reflects the PR. I mean I didn't have any major SEO knowledge for my other sites and the had PR3.

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  2. I'm not giving up on the softtester blog, I was giving up on my other software product development blog - on which i spend very little time. I'd always intended to keep posting here but I wasn't sure about carrying on with my other blog - too much time to do everything I want!

    It depends what you mean by difficult really when trying to get PR 3. I think with a site selling shareware, whether you know it or not you are doing link-building when submitting PAD files. I also think that since you have a network of sites on which you've tried different ways of selling different things you've also - perhaps not knowingly - done a lot of things that are a good way of getting a good rank. I also think that if you totted up the hours spent on the maindwarp-consultancy site it would total a lot of hours.

    A big advantage for you is the Softtester site. Again, this is a natural link-building machine.

    If you look around the web there are lots o business websites - small businesses I mean - who are operating alone and not submitting PADs. These guys are absolutely in the position of not knowing or doing much about SEO and lots and lots of them are PR0. Their sites function for them but they operate as a sort of online calling card/ brochure to which they can refer people who need to read a bit more about their services.

    I'd also like to get this blog off its PR N/A value - not because it really matters but because I think it deserves it. We've packed in a lot of info over the past few months.

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  3. Yeah, I guess so.

    Although I think as far as success goes, PR isn't a good indicator, as far as sales are concerned.

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  4. I agree. Traffic is what really counts. I still have been unable to access the stats.

    I think people have a tendency (or at least I do anyway!) to like getting good scores and PR is a simple numering scheme that you can try and do better on.

    To get this blog to have more visits I think we'd need to change the template/ style and improve the title and description. We could then promote it a bit more.

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  5. Actually, I didn't mean traffic either. With a lot of my pages I have PR3 or P2 and some traffic. But I've used the wrong keywords and the content of the pages isn't very good.

    So I'm getting the wrong visitors.

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