San Francisco— Consider it as a belated Christmas gift or a New Year’s present, though just before New Year’s Eve Google surprised many websites with their Toolbar PageRank update rolled out to every website, which astonished many web publishers and bloggers talking about their changes in PageRank over the New Year holiday, Matt Cutts ultimately confirmed on Twitter that it was indeed a Google update.
About a week or so ago, some webmasters speculated that there was a Toolbar Pagerank Update on-going in December 2008. It was however then unconfirmed whether this was an official update.
But, Cutts later wrote on his blog, “In case you did not see where I confirmed it on Twitter, Google recently did a toolbar PageRank update. It is pretty much done now. If you want more info, I have answered questions about PageRank and the Google Toolbar in the past.”
Majority of the start-up sites have benefited through this PR update, although some have lost and some remained the same.
Search Engine Journal’s Google PageRank stayed the same at PR 6, but an upcoming site called IMBroadcast.com/s Google Toolbar PageRank is now a PageRank 4 (up from a PR 0 as this is a relatively new site).
Webmasters are already rumbling on the change via Twitter:
@gyutae crap… Google just updated PageRank… WinningtheWeb.com went down from a 4 to 3.. and lost site links
@JustinLoans: Google Pagerank updated today!! Anybody went up? 3 out of 4 of my sites went up woohoo
@dragonblogger: Just found out my Poetry Blog received a Google PageRank of 2 today. Ironic since it has 1/10th as much traffic as my other 2 blogs
More Twitter discussions on the Google PageRank Update can be found here.
Generally, the toolbar PR is only a small indication of your site’s actual “Pagerank”. So long as your site is ranking well for the terms that you target and you are getting substantial amount of traffic from the search engines, you are doing just fine.
People’s sites are going both up and down, but it is important to remember that the toolbar is “not an accurate indicator of how Google ranks or values a site,” as Loren Baker notes at Search Engine Journal. However, it is still part of the evaluation factor.
Cutts also makes the bold prediction that this will be the last PageRank update of the year. While you are there you might as well begin chasing him for any other short sentenced pearls of wisdom.
Did you notice the little green bar change for your site?