Google ToolBar PageRank Update In Progress
A search on Google’s Blog Search reveals that many people are seeing material evidence of a Google ToolBar PR update. Since this has become such a big event for webmasters around the world, we thought we’d help spread some of the joy.
So far, the news is that many 4-6 month old sites are showing PR in the toolbar for the first time, but also that many older sites have dropped down to PR 0.
The consensus seems to be that the drop to PR0 is not a penalty, but actually part of an ongoing data push for the current update. Let’s hope so!
The best way to get a picture of your forthcoming pagerank is to use this tool called LivePR which allows you to see Toolbar PageRank across a sampling of many Google datacenters.
Seems as though sites that are *changing* their PR are showing up PR 0 on a number of datacenters.
Thanks for this post, Micah. I had noticed some PR changes in some of my sites as well. I can confirm that some of my sites that were PR6 earlier this week suddenly dropped to zero. On one of my sites, I noticed a big jump in Google-referred traffic yesterday. Could there be a correlation? Are you able to quantify, say, what a 1-point bump up in PR would mean for search traffic to a site? Looking forward to more updates on this topic.
I noticed that a few of my sites have been moving up and down in PR last few days. Google traffic also increased a little (*knock on wood*), but I don’t think there’s a correlation this early in the stage. Thank you for the heads-up.
Dan,
Google updates are much more complicated in terms of material effects than you might expect, and PageRank has come to be less significant in the overall algorithm than many believe.
For example, changes in SERPS generally aren’t tied to updates in SEO specific information (toolbar, link: searches, etc). Google updates its Toolbar PR about 4 months after it has actually determined a new PR internally for algorithmic application. The delay is meant to deter the abuse of PageRank selling via text links.
Regarding the correlation between a big jump in traffic and PR, I think it is nothing but a weak correlation. Google updates its index on what seems now to be a weekly basis. The Toolbar PR is part of a much less frequent data push that occurs about once ever 4 months and seems to correspond with updates to other information that matters primarily to *webmasters * as opposed to the general surfer – stuff like the “link:” search.
However, I can confirm that several of my sites have seen huge increases in traffic over the last month and I suspect that this is the result of more than a minor update, although Matt Cutts swears that the changes are just that: minor.
Seems like Just about all the sites I wanted to see changes are still shaking out.