All webmasters know more or less about Google Page Rank. For those who are unaware –ideally, it is a score given by Google to every website to and measured on a scale of 1-10. Despite many controversies and lots of uninformed people/webmaster denouncing PR as being a mere number, Googe Technology notes that it is in the heart of all Google ranking. A higher PR website is said to be of higher quality.

According to commonly believed notion- Google assigns PR to a website based on the total value of votes received from other sites which in turn means summation of PR value of all inbound links to a particular website.

Recently, Google has been indexing contents almost instantly (Matt Cutts says “Minty Fresh Index” ) and crawling links regularly. It is reflected in the change of Google search results that seems to change all the time and which is known as Google dance. It is also believed by many webmasters that, PR Update is dynamic and is always adjusted internally. But Google exports the PR value to its toolbar only once every 3-4 months. Hence, every toolbar export brings in a lot of excitements, joy and heartburn among SEO and webmaster community. Most believe that, it is the result of the link-building and content development work put into the last 10-15 weeks. The previous two toolbar exports happened on 25^th January and 27^th April. But Alas! This time, the toolbar export is taking too long and the community has gone from excited to impatient to a state of surrendering their fate to Google!

So why is the toolbar PR export taking so long this time around (already the longest period in the toolbar export history)? Well there might be lots of reasons in my view.

1. Matt Cutts used his blog to get feedback from webmasters with the post “How To Report Paid Links”. It is often believed that Google uses him to communicate effectively with webmasters. There has been lots of hue-n-cry about it – but the fact remains that Google got what they wanted – Feedback. Based on that feedback – they have changed all their algorithms and are testing them.
2. Due to new Page Rank algorithm, Google is trying it out with the current PR update and testing it. This is very evident with some selective sites getting updated and most sites not getting updated. Once Google feels their new algorithms have passed all tests and should work perfectly the way they want them to work, the toolbar export will be released. will to wait till that happens.

Possible Outcome with the New Algo:

As is the case, Google will discount lots of paid links (as they might deem any) and there will be huge fluctuations of PR of sites and of course SERPs. So far, it has been quite easy to manipulate PR till PR6 as webmasters can make out how many of what PR inbound links are necessary to attain a particular PR. That kind of Page Rank manipulation will be harder.

Another possible fall-out will be that of raising the standard of PR. What I mean is, no longer will 4 PR7 inbound links be enough for gaining PR6.

Google might also bring in content factor in its Page Rank valuation. So far, there has been loud calls to omit Page Rank completely from Google’s system as anybody with little quality contents could get high Page Rank and hence SERPs.

All these will change Page Rank & SERPs hierarchy and many SEOs who have developed their business on Paid Link model will loose their jobs- there will be more heart burns.

Disclaimer: All these views are purely mine- on the basis of my study.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under SEO Articles, Admin Note. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.