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Written by Jerry West
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Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
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A Toolbar PageRank update which just hit Google over the last couple of days. I have spent the last three hours analyzing the update and how my test domains faired. It is pretty interesting. Before I get into the results, let's cover a few things about the update ...
The PageRank score is numerical and has an unlimited number of decimal places that it is carried out. So when we see the toolbar showing a PageRank of 5, that can be a range from 4.x - 5.x, depending upon how Google does their "rounding". The point is, what we see on the toolbar can be very misleading as to what the actual PageRank value is. Also, the PageRank Google shows on the toolbar can be between 1-4 months old, depending on the data Google decides to show publicly. Much like the stock market quotes online that are "delayed 15 minutes", Google "delays" showing you the PageRank value for months, even though they are computing the live data on a daily basis.
The last public Toolbar was completed around March 4th when the data became stable again. So this was a rather quick update, inside of 60 days as they are usually once a quarter.
Test Domain Results
No site ranked PR4 or above received an increase in PageRank, despite strong link acquisition over the last 60 days.
Site's which were penalized to a PR0 by submitting to "garbage" directories had their PageRank bounce back to a PR1 or PR2 regardless of what the previous PageRank. For example, one site which was slammed to a PR0 from a PR6 came back to a PR2.
Sites which launched in late February and have had a strong link campaigns still remain at PR0. It seems the data for this public update was pulled sometime in February, but I have not verified this.
Sites which launched last fall and relied on traditional linking methods and press releases all climbed to PR3 in this update. No paid links or paid directories were done to these sites.
Since Google did a slight update on the PageRank of directories a few weeks ago, I'm not seeing any movement in the main or secondary directories.
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