A Very Unusual Pagerank Update

admin | September 12, 2008

Last week, many webmasters noticed that Googles public pagerank system (a rough measure of each sites importance in the search engine) was displaying higher than expected rankings for some sites.

Many virtually unlinked and unheard of sites rose significantly on the scale, without any official explanation from the search giant. Two of my sites were affected were . Both were ranked 0 out of 10 before the change, but rose to PR6 afterwards. Other sites have been known to rise as high as PR8 as a result of this update.

The strange thing is that this was not a normal update, as it only made a difference to newly created PR0 websites, and didnt affect most internal pages (at least in my experence). Reaction from other webmasters can be found at this SitePoint forum thread.

Many webmasters believe that this unusual update could further devalue the meaning of PR (which is meaningless enough already for search engine optimization purposes), but I am currently mulling a theory that Google could have a different opinion altogether.

I find it somewhat unlikely that the worlds biggest search engine would deliberately destroy the entire PR system. Rough and inaccurate as it is, the PR scale is the only way to get a simple reading of a sites backlink weight, directly from Google.

Instead, my theory is that Google is turning PR itself into an elaborate experiment. They could be attempting to make it a more accurate measure of a sites value, updated on a frequent, or even constant basis. Such a figure cant be expected to be totally accurate right away, but if Google is trying to introduce such an improvement, I commend them for it.

Now, I must warn you, this is just a theory, and I make no guarantees that it is correct, but its quite a possible explanation in my opinion. Whether Google has success in implementing it is another matter altogether.