New Toolbar PageRanks coming

Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.

331 Responses to New Toolbar PageRanks coming (Leave a comment)

  1. I figured the SEO industry could use something to discuss, so I thought I’d give people a heads-up about the toolbar PageRanks.

  2. What sort of older penalties are expiring?

  3. Nice! Thanks for the heads-up, Matt.

  4. I think this post is a great idea. Lets start talking about our Page Ranks even before it goes up or down.

    I am happy to hear that those sites that repent are having their penalties removed.

  5. Any insight on how it’s being calculated? What makes it different from the way you guys calculated PR before? Are you putting more emphasis on certain things?

  6. Interesting to see this news. So no immediate plans to put the PageRank kitty back in the bag??

  7. Thanks matt,

    What exactly is the Toolbar PageRank anyway?

    Is it truly green fairy dust?
    Does it actually measure something useful?
    How do people use the ToolBar PageRank information in a meaningful way?

    I’ve read all sorts of things about how Google will sometimes do things like continue to show a high PageRank in the Toolbar for a site that has lost it’s ability to pass that PageRank, etc… I guess in an effort to keep that sort of penalty opaque.

    Could you give us some more information? Confirm some facts and dispel some rumors about the Toolbar PageRank and it’s usefulness.

    Thanks!

  8. Could you wrap up how the toolbar PR relates to the internally computed PR in terms of timing, precision and so on?

  9. Is this announcement a sign of things to come? More transparency? And I don’t mean PageRank updates.

  10. Thank you very much for stirring the hornet’s nest AGAIN!
    I am heading to a cave up in the mountains to meditate………

  11. What is sequence Google use to release the PageRanks shift by shift? By area, by TLD, or others?

  12. Thanks Matt.

    Search marketers all of the world will brace for the flurry of client calls about “why their PageRank dropped” even though their actual rankings didn’t—what fun! 🙂

  13. Excellent, something new and less contentious to discuss. Thx.

  14. Thanks for the update Matt.

    We noticed a particularly long delay (around one week) of major site’s homepages between the 14th – 21st of this month. Does the update have anything to do with this?

  15. *cache dates

  16. Thank you for the communication sir.
    It is most appreciated.

  17. I agree with Phillip Lenssen, I would love to hear more about how the toolbar PR corresponds to the actual algorithmic PR!

  18. Oh goody goody gum drops! I hope mine go up!

  19. Thanks for the heads up Matt! This hopefully gives some people something to talk about, other than the useless name calling. 🙂

  20. No PR update yet !! i hope i hear good news !!

  21. Yeah they need to bring it.I wonder if that’s in response to the moves Yahoo is making on their own system of ranking pages.
    Google is usually only motivated when it’s in Google best interest;)
    Thanks for the info,nothing personal Peace

  22. Intresting. I hope my sites can get some juice! 😀

  23. i felt this news coming, didn’t expect it from here though!

  24. Time to get sell some links!!! omg omg

    Just kidding. 🙂

  25. Oh, and we will be holding Matt personally responsible for any page rank devalues. But if our pagerank goes up, we take full credit. SEO’rs don’t have to make sense or be logical. heh.

  26. Thanks for the update. I’m curious to see what happens on it.

  27. Thanks Matt for the advanced information. 🙂 It is always good to see some green on the toolbar, and you letting us know its on the way makes it all the more special!

    The discussions about which penalties expired will prove to be interesting!

  28. Page rank is one of the most talked about topic in SEO industry. So one will see blogosphere will buzz with this topic in the next 10-15 days.

  29. Now this creates a level of anticipation for a PR update I haven’t felt in years.

    Nice 🙂

  30. Thanks for the update…Are the features on the tool bar also being updated?

  31. What are all the people in the Digital Point forums going to worry about now?

  32. On average how often does the toolbar PR get updated?

    Thanks,

    ~ Jim

  33. Thankyou, finally some hard and fast info on this little green (or grey) buggers whereabouts, ive starting to become unhealthily addicted to info about it over the last week or so, I will rest alittle easier tonight!

    I was wondering, just how old is the data for this update matt? As I understand it makes no difference to serps-as the changes woulda already been prevelant. Sowould be interested to try and put a loose date on when it is based? a week old? fortnight? month?! & Does this alter with different variables?

  34. Well I missed out on the excitement of this announcement since I noticed a drop in my pagerank today before I read my feeds. Hopefully, it won’t be a trend and continue to go down with future updates.

  35. Jim Gaudet,

    Roughly 3 months.

  36. Jim Gaudet, normally we do a new push of toolbar PageRanks every 3-4 months.

  37. I am confused about PageRank, link juice, and the nofollow requirements associated with them.

    I understand the part about buying/selling links, paid reviews, and that sort of thing requiring nofollow.

    What I don’t understand, and find to be handled quite differently across the Internet are things like :

    *Websites touting services they have performed for other companies with a link to those websites (most, but not all, seem to be plain …not nofollowed…links)

    *links to unrelated sites on blogs (both nofollowed and plain as well) within the content, not footers etc.

    These are two examples I am curious about as examples. I know if you are doing affiliate sales or are “paid for the link” it should be nofollowed but how do you know about the rest like to two examples above for instance. When to nofollow and when not to.

  38. Just wondering, if a site is penalized, are they told why anywhere?

  39. Good,my PR will be 5

  40. Have there been any updates to the way penalties are assessed or is it simply the expiration of some old “non relevent” ones. ?

  41. Am I the only one round here that couldn’t care less??

    Come on Matt, anyone who’s been working in SEO for more than a year probably doesn’t even have toolbar PR turned on.

  42. What old penalties may be expiring? Could you elaborate about what might be changing? I’m sure other people would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this? So far my PR hasn’t changed and several others I know haven’t either. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet. I check back again.

  43. come on,baby…….

    PR 5 !

  44. Yeah I was noticing that a lot of sites got hammered on this newest update. Seems like everything you do unless it is pay per click, or adwords is now deemed spam. Bummer for all those commercial sites like mine.

    Make sure and use no follow or you could be next!! 🙂

  45. I put Blogger up on a new domain for a local congregation on March 6th, and by the time the next TBPR update rolled out, it was showing PR. That was about 6-8 (maybe 9) weeks after, so this will be the second one in only few months time, which is more frequent than it seems to have been in the past.

  46. Wow, that’s a gr8 news matt!
    I am looking forward to get good rank for few of my sites this update.
    Thanks for the heads up

  47. I hope it.

  48. Why the pagerank update in America before China

  49. Great to hear! Instead of pleasant surprise or ugly shock after the fact, we can be watching on pins and needles over the weekend…..like some of us have nothing better to do on a weekend than watch PR fluctuate and then eventually settle at a new number. 🙂

  50. Ooops!

    First devalue linksjuice by way of blocking PR power !

    Matt – are you enticing the industry to open up and say that SEO industry is dependent on buying PR?

    You guys at G-Plex have devalued all those crappy web directories (which is understandable) – and then blogs. Penalized all & sundry involved in buying & selling links.

    Now, I wonder what made G become so generous -that prompted you to announce to the industry that all is FORGIVEN !
    May be you guys have found a new algo to deal with it.
    May be (which I think) – the SERP results were better in Pre-penalization time than after penalization!

    Ooops again! 😀

  51. Thanks for the good news. I’m expecting about how many PR my site will have.

  52. Is it true that pagerank actually breaks down into more multiples, for example, if a site is a pr5 on the green google toolbar there is actually a finer distinction such as 5.2 or 5.3. I am not sure if this is urban legend so maybe Mr. Cutts himself can verify or negate this?

  53. Please give me a link to detect

  54. Dave (original)

    Matt, what about green TBPR on a green background 😉

    Out of interest, does Google have any numbers of Google toolbar users who *don’t* own a web site that enable PageRank intentionally. My guess is they represent less than 1%.

  55. noted. thanks for the heads up matt.

  56. Joel Lesser, no immediate plans to put the PageRank kitty back in the bag. I’m not 100% sure I know what that means, but I’m going with my best guess.

    Nick, the new toolbar PageRanks shouldn’t have anything to do with whether you had a page that wasn’t crawled as much for a short time.

    yannis, I wouldn’t expect any new features in the toolbar. This is strictly a data refresh of new values. See this post about data pushes, algorithm updates and so on.

    Shannon, http://google.com/webmasters/ has a link to the webmaster console with a Message Center that often alerts site owners to issues, and there’s also a link to the Webmaster Discussion Group where people can offer advice as well.

    james ryan, no update to the way that new penalties are assessed; just the expiration of some older ones.

    RecycleCindy, it could be a few days before people see the toolbar PageRank changing, unless they go poking around on different datacenter IP addresses.

    Drake, I think I’ve covered this before. *rummage rummage* Ah, here we go. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend my More info on PageRank post. The first Q&A answers your question, Drake:

    Philipp Lenssen asks: “Matt, I often wonder, how is the PageRank value stored internally, is it a floating-point number as many people suggest or is it just the integer value itself due to the heavy recursive PR computations?”

    It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.

    Dave (original), I believe your intuition is way off on this one. The last time I checked, many many more users turned on the PageRank display than there are site owners. The PageRank display is actually a popular feature, as it turns out.

  57. Very good news … thank you for info

  58. Dave (original)

    I stand corrected then, thanks.

    However, its popularity raises another question. Does popular=accurate in regards to TBPR?

    I have a hunch that the higher the PR of the page, the more accurately it reflects on the Toolbar?

  59. I am curious about a site that nearly dominates all terms for a certain sector, or more specifically it’s page rank, which shows to be zero, yet is able to seemingly able to triumph over sites that have pr4 and pr5.

    Is there any explanation for this, maybe a sign of penalty or black hat possibly? just curious.

  60. Thanks for filling the summer slump!

  61. Matt, Can you give some insight on the penalties being lifted?

    Would appreciate it.

  62. Dave (original), I believe your intuition is way off on this one. The last time I checked, many many more users turned on the PageRank display than there are site owners. The PageRank display is actually a popular feature, as it turns out.

    I’m not so sure he’s totally wrong about this. My memory may not serve totally correctly on this (and it’s after 2 AM and I can’t sleep), but isn’t the PageRank indicator visible by default after the install? In other words, the question I would have is “how many end users (i.e. people with no vested interest in web design on any level) fully comprehend what PageRank is and use it willingly?”

    The only thing I can come up with is users who use the TBPR value are making the quite understandable mistake of using PageRank as the measure of the quality of a page. If this is indeed the case, then the need exists for a quality indicator that is both more complex (read: harder to reverse engineer) and more accurate. A lot of the stats are already gathered via Analytics for at least a large percentage of sites, and other measures that can’t be gathered from Analytics as such (e.g. coding quality or lack thereof, which is easily enough determined from say the W3C validator; and measures such as Flesch-Kincaid, which may even have anti-webspam implications as well.)

  63. From where do you know when a PR update is made?

  64. “Dave (original), I believe your intuition is way off on this one. The last time I checked, many many more users turned on the PageRank display than there are site owners. The PageRank display is actually a popular feature, as it turns out.”

    I saw pagerank active on my 74 year old father-in-laws Google Toolbar! He does not know the technical details of pagerank, but he knows the general idea!

  65. Matt,

    Thanks for the update. Thats remindes me of the good old days where you keept us informed of PageRank updates 🙂

    And thats bring me some more PR reporting work to do here at work. And I need to pray:

    Almighty God

    Please bless our news sites the national and the local and our verticals the high GOOG PageRank they deserve.

    Amen 🙂

  66. Thanks for the Update Matt, interesting days are ahead 😀

  67. Thnks for the update Matt.I am waitng for TGPR update and eager to see the penalties?

  68. Good News! Now again all SEO folks will start a month long debete on Pros & Cons of PR value….Any way i am more interested in knowing about Penalty Part!! Can you please elaborate what type of older penalties are being removed? When you say Older penalties are expiring – does it means all kind of Penaltise or Just PR related penalties?

    BTW – How many types of penalties you guys have? Any Idea?

  69. Thanks for the news Matt.

    Saludos
    Rodrigo from Chile.

  70. Thanks for the news,
    it”s come all the way too israel
    dudi

  71. Thanks for the heads up Matt! This hopefully gives some people something to talk about, other than the useless name calling

  72. Technically how many days does ‘a few’ make?

  73. Thanks for the update Matt!

  74. Hi Matt, sorry for my bad english: im a poor italian!
    Im very fond of seo and i read your blog every day.
    I see that the time between a PR update is longer and longer than the past. And its not all that i see.
    Some years ago (one refresh per month, oh wonderfull times) values change all toghether, now.. only group sites per time: only new sites, only old sites, (maybe only trusted -dmoz.ed sites??) ecc.
    My question is: do you have some problem calculating PR?
    I know PR is a iterative algorithm (ive read Brin – Page university work), so i suppose that more pages are “in the box” and more is longer or difficult to find approssimative values. Is it True or i am like Fox Molder that i see aliens everywhere ? If its not, Why now only grouped sites PR change?
    Thanks a lot, Matt, Stay beautiful!

  75. Sorry again Matt, one more question a little bit OFF TOPIC. There was an algo update some days ago? It seems that the “TITLE component” of a page is less important that before. Is that real? Thanks again

  76. Matt, I am wondering a little bit about this post as “they say” that PageRank is almost unimportant. Why informing the world about a such unimportant news? 😉

    Regards,
    Wulffy

  77. Dave (original)

    I saw pagerank active on my 74 year old father-in-laws Google Toolbar! He does not know the technical details of pagerank, but he knows the general idea!

    Did you show him how to turn it off and did HE intentionally enable it?

  78. And knowing the TBPR of a website achieves what exactly?

    It’s a bit of fluff to assuage those who cling to increasingly naive opinion that links are important. If that’s you then carry on while those how are more concerend about conversion continue to make money.

    I have no idea what my page rank is and I don’t care. I rank well and it’s not because I have TBPR of 99, it’s because the content is good.

    Increasing your TBPR won’t suddnly make your site more productive, it won’t increase your CTR, it won’t double your conversions. Forget about TBPR and concentrate instead on increasing your conversion rate.

    Annnnnd relax…..

  79. Hi, Matt. I lost my all google traffic. & I lose my earnings…:(

    Can you please tell me Is It a ban or anything else….:(

    The keyword was Quotes and Sayings.
    Please Reply Me…

  80. Brrr…new PageRank refresh…

  81. Honestly, I haven’t installed Google Tool bar recently, with Firefox and IE both having decent search bars (any engine) and everything else competing for space on my shrunken laptop – I am a less is more kinda guy (he says with more plugins in FF than he would like to admit to …)

    As for pagerank – it is odd how this is used to ‘value’ links for so many people, and yet buying links is against the Ts and Cs of Google! So, what really is the point in telling people what page rank they have, except to get them competing wierdly…

  82. In my opinion, toolbar pagerank is a measuere of stable semantic IBL’s, in other words, Google’s relatively stable measure of the importance of a page, a reflection or mirror of what I call Google’s adaptive inverted link matrix model of the web, real meaningful citations or votes if you prefer a non mathematical language. I personally do not know of a better software (BOT) model in 2008.

    It is the outcome of a complex system like temperature is the outcome of a partly known high dimensional system. In a sense, a projection from that system to the thermometer or the temperature metric represented by a single number.

    Toolbar pagerank should not be confused with SERP position that so many webmasters do. Neither should it be confused with directory or internal PageRank that may fluctuate from day to day.

  83. Thank you matt

  84. Maybe this will finally mean that the domain I bought will have it’s penalty removed (even after 3 inclusion requestions over the past 5 months) and that it will start showing up index wise. Good stuff Matt

  85. Dave (original)

    Well said, Graham.

    While most are chasing TBPR, others are building site pages for humans. It should be a no-brainer what Google the SE and its users prefer. Hint to the “SEO pros”, it’s not TBPR.

  86. Hey Matt, thanks for that post. As far as I can remember there has never been a post which announces new PageRank values. That is really a big help as all the PageRank “Update” related threads can be ignored….Thanks

  87. Matt – are the penalties that are expiring related to sites that have filed a reconsideration/reinclusion request? Or are there other sites that may have made substantial changes being considered as well?

    I’m just wondering if it’s necessary to file a reinclusion request or if it’s possible that if I’ve made the necessary changes, will they be noticed?

  88. That’s very interesting. Let’s hear more about the expiring penalties, one of my directories was penalized and despite correcting my wrongs and submitting reconsideration it remains penalized. I know of one site that recovered some PR but that site had some inside help, didn’t it? What really worries me, it’s now so very easy to get competitors website penalized. When the “Older” sites were penalized the Google search results revealed some interesting facts as half of the websites showing in the result were committing the same crimes as the penalized sites were if not more yet managed to avoid any hit. I’m not bitter and still look forward to the update.

  89. Hi There, is a reconsideration request mandatory for a site that has been de indexed ?

    Do you re review penalised/deindexed sites for reindexing without the request.

  90. Wow, what a post to wake up too! Not only was it exciting, but the fact that you mentioned the penalties expiration was even sweeter – will be interesting to see if any sites I suspect were penalized from the past come out from the penalty box!

    Thanks Matt – very cool that you’re so up front about it 🙂

  91. Am thinking of running a book on how long till the future pagerank tool @ SEO chat crashes with people hammering it for a sneak peak of their PageRank

  92. Thanks Matt for the heads up…it was about time for an update :o)

  93. Matt,

    Could you clarify what the LOW, MEDIUM & HIGH Page-Rank values in Google Webmaster Tools are?

    I’ve heard all sorts of assumptions that Low=0-4, MEDIUM=5-6, HIGH=7-10..

    Is this true or are the values different?

  94. Matt,

    Would this explain why my website seems to have dropped off of the google radar in terms of searching keywords? For the past 3 weeks, I’ve went from 25-30 visits a day to basically 0. The only way I can find my website is by using the site:domain feature.

    What are your thoughts?

  95. That sounds good to me, thanks for the update.

    I am quite excited about the PR update should be fun 😀

  96. I guess its not started yet?

    If its started lets rocks 🙂

  97. Nice, good things, i hope google give me interesting PR…. 😉

  98. Wishing good luck to all those who expect a hike in their PRs.

  99. The fact old penalties will be expiring is very interesting… it effectively means what was wrong once, is now ok with google… (that’s certainly what most people are gonna think)… ‘paid links’ is the only big issue i can think of here… maybe i’m totally off the ball…

    If it is indeed anything related to paid links, it’s going to be back to square one eventually… pagerank will become more important, so important that it becomes more valuable than traffic or readers.The way things are at the minute, i believe, is killing pagerank as it’s no longer an accurate measure of a site’s strength… take john chow’s blog – PR4 at present, if i come across it, look at the PR value… i assume it’s a much smaller blog than it actually is. Ok, granted, it’s basically a page full of ads, but the PR value still isn’t an accurate measure of the site’s value to the end user imo.

    The purpose of PR is to reflect the ‘importance of web pages’ but at the minute on *some* sites that’s not accurate due to the whole paid links ban/punishment.

    Anyway, looking forward to the new update to see what the big G have in store 🙂

  100. my pr is 0 ,I want it update quickly.

  101. Thanks for the heads up Matt!

  102. Hi,
    Thanks for the update…
    Are the features on the tool bar also being updated?

  103. Waiting my new pagerank 😀

  104. I am looking forward to see the new PR. Because I think my site is one of victims of some penalties.

  105. I look forward to seeing what will happen on internal pages this time around. I noticed that directories, forums, and just about all types of web sites, had internal pagerank removed for many pages, and often without it making a lot of sense.

    Just to give an example there was a site with about 6 tabs at the top, and some tabs had good pagerank, and others had none, yet the links pointing to those pages had a relatively equal strength. Another example would be a forum with some of the main forum pages having pagerank and others having none, yet with no obvious inequality in terms of links pointing to those pages. And a third example that interests me is directories. Some directories have internal category pages with pagerank, while others do not, while still others have it on some categories but not others.

    It will be good see if some real meaning will return to the pagerank results that are returned for internal pages. At this point, it seems there are some irregularities, but no clear explanation why they exist, so hopefully you might be able to shed some light on this.

    (While I don’t always post, I really appreciate you having this blog, and try to read especially about the webmaster related items, so thanks so much for having it!)

    David

  106. Thanks Matt,

    it was about time somebody started telling us, when the actual GTPR update is coming.

  107. Have you considered increasing the scale from 0-100? Benefits?
    1. More accuracy
    2. Better distinction of quality of web sites

    Cons:
    More fight, more questions to answer 🙂

  108. I don’t have admin access on my PC so can’t install the Google Toolbar and watch my PR rise and fall. It frees up a lot of time in the day to comment on page rank posts.

  109. That’s a great news Mr.Matt. By saying so, you have silenced more PR prediction mongers and put an end to various threads talking about the arrival of the PR update in different webmaster forums. Hope my sites too shoot up in the PR ladder 🙂

  110. Great announcement! Pure cat-nip for SEOs. 🙂

  111. Hey Matt thanks for the heads up! I’m looking forward to see some updates for some of my sites

  112. “…we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.”

    I’ll never understand why Google has taken the position of being the arbiter of what is of “value” to a visitor.

    Let the free market market make that decision and everyone wins.

  113. Age of PR….

    I was pretty astonished to see that PR Update seems to end for sites by June 15th. So for one of Germany´s leading web-news, heise.de

    Is this explicite wish? Or just a problem of technics?

    As the webmastertools give different (more recent) values, this seems to me confusing.

  114. Can someone enlighten me as to the practical, commercial advantage of having the PageRank bar coloured in green a bit more (or maybe less 🙁 )?

    As Dave said above, anyone who’s been working in the job for more than a year probably doesn’t even bother with toolbar PR. Maybe I’ve hit on some sandbox for search engine enthusiasts. It takes a year to realise your sales won’t jump just because the PR has gone from 2 to 3.

    Surely all this sort of news does is either send a bunch of noobs into a panic about why they can’t see any change on their PR toolbar OR mobilize the unscrupulous ne’erdowells of the world to go around touting that their sites now have bare PR and people can send link requests and offers of paid “sponsorship” to info@you-lovez-the-big-pr-linkz-lol.com.

    Also,

    “I figured the SEO industry could use something to discuss”

    LOLZ

  115. Thank you Matt for informing us of the upcoming PR update

  116. Addendum: When I say “Dave” obviously I mean “Simon”.

  117. I look forward to more insight into the pagerank of our sites. My fear is that with the recent rank dropping changes regarding purchased links, will some of our clients pasts come back to haunt them. Will obviously purchased links in history affect current ranking, even if the content of the sites has been updated and optimized since their indiscretions?

  118. Changing the scale for 1-10 to 1-100 is probably not a good idea for Google. I don’t thin they want to give us this level of precision which would enable us to trick their algorithm. But I guess that internally they use more a 1-100000 scale than 1-10…

  119. Wow!.. hope my new sites receives an update!!…

  120. This is great, at last, someone that actually works for Google is telling us when the next toolbar PR update is!! This is a dream come true for many people!! Thanks Matt!!! 🙂

  121. Im quite sure google (excluding some penalties) doesn’t know (care about) WHAT is a site. It only consider pages and how they link each other.

  122. How old is the data for this update today?

  123. I cant wait to see my website PR. Its new and i want at least pr3, but i will see soon 🙂

  124. From the looks of my sites, and my client sites, the PR snapshot appears to be atleast one month old. I’m surprised that the data is not newer.

  125. thanks for the update, does google still only make the pagerank updates that are available to the public once a quarter or so ? does anyone know if this could end up being a monthly event anytime soon ?

  126. Oh excellent news. Im looking forward to seeing if I get some increases I have been working hard at adding fresh articles and content.

  127. thats exciting… love to see increased PR 🙂

  128. “My memory may not serve totally correctly on this (and it’s after 2 AM and I can’t sleep), but isn’t the PageRank indicator visible by default after the install?” M.W.A., when you download and install the Google Toolbar you have to choose to opt-in to see PageRank.

    “From where do you know when a PR update is made?” radhoo, I talked to the people that will push the new data. You do know that I work at Google, right? 🙂

    “do you have some problem calculating PR?” Actually Daniele, over the years we’ve written improved algorithms that can compute the values much faster. Someone should do a post on the official Google blog about that at some point.

    Jane, say thanks to your 74-year-old grandfather for me. 🙂

    “Could you clarify what the LOW, MEDIUM & HIGH Page-Rank values in Google Webmaster Tools are?” Honestly Elad I don’t know. At Google you’ve got full access to the raw values, so I rarely look at the truncated histograms of stuff.

    “Have you considered increasing the scale from 0-100?” Angsuman, I think folks here are happy with the 0..10 scale.

    Glad I could give a heads-up for folks.

  129. @Angsuman – I agree

  130. Thanks, Matt.

  131. Buenos sueños Matt y que el nuevo PR sea como Papa Noel para todos los propietarios de WEB. Tengo 56 años prejubilado y estoy empezando a aprender algo, muy poquito de como Google influye en mi vida.
    Cuida bien de tus gatitos.
    Saludos desde España.

    Matt Good dream and that the new PR is like Santa Claus for all owners WEB. I have 56 years early retirement and I am beginning to learn something, very little as Google influences in my life.
    Take good care of your little cats
    Greetings from Spain

  132. I have my fingers crossed =)

  133. Thank you Matt, however what I want to know is that is the update over? — as I think my website has already updated pagerank or will it change?

    Thanks.

  134. Hi Matt,

    For the first time in the life of http://www.skool.com there’s a page rank now on the toolbar. But all databases that I query still show a page rank of 0. Will those get updated to reflect the pageranking from the toolbar? Does the two correlate?

    Thanks for this update. You should be sleeping if it’s 2am..

  135. Thanks for the update Matt

  136. Thanks for the update Matt, btw nice read in USA Today a few weeks ago. Congrats.

  137. I am a little puzzled about what you said : “we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites”. By older you mean more than one month? I’m asking you this because I have a website( the one in my signature) who has a google penalty since 13 July and I was hopping that my penalty will go away pretty soon – I have no idea why did I receive it in the first place. But if you mean by older more than one month this will not apply to my blog and that’s a really bad news :(…

  138. Good development…but what is the relevance of Toolbar PageRank? I have read several articles indicating that TBPR is not important because Google maintains a secret PageRak which they use to rank sites.

  139. Matt, sorry if it’s a stupid question. but could you please give me some words about what is a pagerank for actually?

    until now i really have no idea what is it for. Many website/blog got penalties, still they said they didn’t get any changing on their search engine position.

    They still get traffics from search engine. so what is it pagerank for actually? I have read the google success story book, the writer said that google search engine use it as one of many factors to sort the search result.

    but looks like he’s wrong. so if it is possible, could you tell me the answer is?

    *yea english is not my mother language*

  140. Again, thanks for the update…
    Now wondering how many people will be suffering and non-sleeping well 😛
    Pura Vida!

  141. When I first install the toolbar at my new computer it showed me a PR6. Since I had to go out I couldn´t check it again until hours later.
    For a few hours I feel really well then it went back to 0.
    I wish my blog could regain its PR4 at least.
    Can I have some hope that this update is not finished yet?

  142. Thanks for the update Matt. This should really get the SEO world buzzing and speculating.

  143. PR updates are almost like having Christmas a couple times a year for web professionals. When it starts getting close you just can’t wait to see what you get. Thanks for the update Matt.

  144. Thank you for the heads up, but I have done extensive research and still do not see my hard work change the PageRank over 2. I wish they would explain it so IDIOTS like myself could see our hard work amount to something.

    GREAT WORK on your part Matt, you put out alot of information. Sometimes we need it broken down for us beginners / moderate designers to be able to understand.

  145. Hi Matt,

    I can see that the page ranks for individual pages on my site are in a state of flux. Is it normal to see the Page Rank of a given page come and go during the few days that Google is making changes? One minute a page says “No Page Rank Available” and the next minute, it’s showing a Page Rank of 2, and then back again. Just wondering if this fluctuation is normal?

    Thanks

  146. Thanks Matt, Im working hard now days to keep my sites firmly within the webmaster guiedlines.

    I apreciate all the hard work you do and im hopeing the update will be nice for me 🙂

  147. Hi Matt,
    Thanks for informing about it..

    This is also true that all world seo are waiting for it..

    But i dont think this pr update, will make any huge change in SERPs//

    Regards,
    Mandeep Singh

  148. Matt,

    In your “More info on PageRank” post, you mention this:

    “At some point we take our internal PageRanks, put them on a 0-10 scale, and export them so that they’re visible to Google Toolbar users.”

    There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst both site owners and Google Toolbar users, regarding the relative value of each Toolbar PageRank number, as they relate to the internal PageRank values. One of the common misconceptions is that the Toolbar PageRank scale is linear–that is, the average internal PageRank value of a page with a Toolbar PageRank of 6 would be twice the average internal PageRank value of a page with a Toolbar PageRank of 3. In other words, many people assume that a TBPR 6 page is roughly twice as “important” as a TBPR 3 page.

    However, site owners have noticed that the difficulty of reaching the next value on the Toolbar PageRank scale… increases at an “exponential” rate for a given page (assuming the acquisition of new links remains constant). This observation has led to theories that TBPR is a logarithmic scale of internal PR values, for example:

    TBPR [4, 5) = internal PR [x^4, x^5), where x is some constant, set by Google.

    Personally, I see potential flaws in this type of scale, but it still makes more sense than a linear scale. But anyway, my question is:

    Can you please give us a better understanding of how Google determines the Toolbar PageRank values from the internal PageRank values?

    Or, if you’d prefer, you can simply email me the entire Google algorithm, and I’ll just figure it out for myself. Whatever’s easiest for you. 🙂

    – Darren Slatten

  149. Let it come. I’m ready. 🙂

  150. Very Good!… Google Dance for my website… lest go!

  151. Yes Matt; I’m glad you gave all of us a heads-up as well…… lol. You are a funny guy Matt.

    Well let’s see; Matt posted this I think yesterday, and there are already over 100 comments on it. I have to give big kudos to Matt and Google. They sure do know how to change the subject. LOL

    Gee; I can’t wait to wade through all the subsequent comments about “why did my pagerank go down”.

  152. Hi Matt,

    one of my pages – only very few visitors and links, no unique content (only youtube vids), seldomly updated – keeps steady at PR4.

    My main page – many visitors and links, only unique content, regularely updated – dropped from PR4 to PR3. Now its prognosed to drop to PR2.

    What do Google want to teach me with this?

    Greetings from Germany,
    Stefan

  153. It almost at the same time Google rumored will buy Digg, Digg acquired and the PageRank will disappeared..? I don’t think this not co-related, better Google PageRate thank PageRank, I though !!

  154. Matt,

    Thanks for this info.
    When you say “we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites”, I hope that penalty (wich I don’t know the reason) on my website since 20th april will be expering…

    PS: Excuse my bad english…

  155. Expiring some penalties would probably explain some of the Yo Yo results lately. Once search has the site selling the links pass no value, so link buy gets no juice. Next result has added the juice back in and link buyer now gets a big push.

    All they changed was the working sponsors to affiliates. They still sell the links, and people still buy them.

    If you are going to ask for link buying reports, then you should at least take action against them until they stop selleing the links and not allow the selling site to pass anchor text juice.

    Who cares about the PR, it’s the anchor text juice that is going to get you results on a site wide link buy with 25K + pages indexed.

    For example: http://www.videohelp.com/

  156. Matt,

    It would be great if you could do a blog post about the different types of penalties that Google levies. I think there’s a ton of confusion about what a penalty is, sitewide, in the serps, etc.

    Scott

  157. Looking for some help!!!

    Matt, I have a site that is not not ranking on the first page anymore for any of its keywords I optimized the site for. My site ranked on page 1 for very competitive keywords and I never bought or sold a link on my site. I DID link exchange but then when I found that link exchange is not allowed, By all means, I am being totally honest here. I stopped all the link exchange activity so that I do not get penalized. I kept adding fresh content. Some of my content was copied. In fact someone took my whole site and copied it on some server. I couldn’t do anything about it because I couldn’t redo every single page again. That was just impossible.

    My competitors have a HUGE amount of budget to spend on buying links all the time. I also had one of the sites reported as the webmaster of the site kept buying links on huge sites and that actually worked for him and got him rankings. In fact, if you search for his site you’ll see two of his pages listed on the main page. The top position holders now are all those sites that have heavy budget for buying links.

    I NEVER bought a link and lost all my rankings. I know it sounds as if I am complaining and being a little baby here but my website meant a LOT for me in every way. I don’t earn much from it now and I keep loosing my rankings.

    I redid the whole code, I added RSS feeds, placed no follow attribute to all the outgoing links, added new content but I can’t keep track of all my pages if they have been copied now. I have been trying to do more SEO work but it’s just not working. Again, I have NEVER sold a link on my site.

    I am dead sure that I am not the only one. In fact, there are must be a huge number of webmasters going through these problems. I am frustrated because I have to support my family, my parents and myself and I can’t do that properly now why? Because my competitors pushed me down the pages and it seems as if they also used some tricks to get my site penalized? I mean that has to be the only explaination that I could think of?

    You are a busy guy, you must have a lot to do and I know you can not take care of individual problems but could you guys please, pleeeaaseee do something that could warn us or could give us a little idea if there is something wrong with our site so that we could take care of. Not every webmaster wants to manipulate search results by using black hat SEO methods and certainly not everyone can afford to spend $5000-$10000 each month only for link-buying purpose.

    I have worked with heart and soul on my site. Since the day me and my wife created it till date, we have worked hard on it and still are but we don’t see any positive result. Is buying links really the only way to rank on Search engines now? It’s heart wrenching to see others do so good while we suffer for apparently no reason.

  158. Matt,

    I wish the Webmaster Console folks would throw a little permanent blue bar in the “High” row for PageRank, instead of having it come and go. I don’t care if it means anything, it’s just damn depressing to log in and see nothing but “Medium” and “Low”.

    Morris

  159. Hey Matt, as I understand it, you’re something like the head of quality control or Chief Spam Remover or something like that, right?

    So, what would you do if there were no SE spam?

    Cash in your stocks and sit on the beach?

    Open a bagel cafe?

    Be a professional blogger?

    Go back to the NSA?

    😀

    Your Pal,
    Bompa

  160. Wish good news for all my blog 🙂
    Thanks matt

  161. Thanks,Matt.I checked some websites in some pr checker sites.It’s really true as you have said.

  162. I figured the SEO industry could use something to discuss, so I thought I’d give people a heads-up about the toolbar PageRanks.
    Nice to know it’s coming – but is this advice an attempt to switch talk away from Google-Digg acquisition talk?

    I am not a cynic – much

  163. I was fixing a client’s site and found some malware in a javascript on his site. I removed it… did some other general things like registered the site with webmaster tools and google analytics… immediately the PR jumped from 1 to 4.

    Are any changes we make capable of producing that kind of large PR jump – removing malware for instance?

    I’ve not seen it in the past and maybe I just had the uncanny fortune of fixing his site DURING the removal of the expired penalties?

    Strange, yes?

  164. Wow yeah, now I can read my new toolbar PageRank directly in it, cool!
    Well, it’s time to sleep now in France (3 am) – Good night 😉

  165. the prediction tools seem to be all down 🙁

  166. Thanx Matt! Hope it would enhance some PR to my sites in the coming days.

  167. That’s good,i’am waiting……

  168. Google PageRank as you expected has been started, I can see the updated values in my toolbar for all of my blogs. I confirmed this news here

    http://www.dailytechnologytips.com/2008/07/google-pagerank-q2-2008-update-july-24.html

    I was able to get good PR for all of my blogs…no fall 🙂

  169. Even you blog has got PageRank value 7. It was 6 before

  170. The axe is on! I don’t sell links and in fact 1000 more inbound links to my home page have got added from last PR update but still my PR is down by 1 point, PR4 to PR3, strapped all the rankings of my internal pages. Hail google algorithm!

  171. Darren, the toolbar PageRank display is not linear. It’s more than twice as hard to get a PR6 compared to a PR3, for example.

    Folks, my blog is not the best place to chat about PageRank for an individual site going up or down. The various forums around the web are probably better for that. 🙂

  172. Couldn’t we just turn your blog, into some sort of disguised forum? But hey, we are only asking you as you work for Google, you have the first hand knowledge, where other forums do not. =D

  173. Hey Matt would you like to exchange pagerank of your blog with mine? pretty please?

  174. Thanks Matt, my page rank is 3 now. My blog is 2 month old only 🙂

  175. Dave (original)

    The axe is on! I don’t sell links and in fact 1000 more inbound links to my home page have got added from last PR update but still my PR is down by 1 point, PR4 to PR3, strapped all the rankings of my internal pages. Hail Google algorithm!

    The BIG clue is in what you THINK are 1000 or more votes/links. The harder you try to *directly* up your links and PageRank the less likely you are to succeed.

    Stop wasting your time and forcing Google to flag your site and start adding content that others WANT to voluntary vote/link to based on merit.

  176. Hi,
    May I expect one of my removed site could be back in Google’s Index during this update. Please note that the site was removed by the previous seo company the site was with not by the google itself.
    regards
    John

  177. Hello There,
    I am also deeply thinking about the Q3 2008 Google PR Update. But as per my point of view this should be happening on this month(July 2008) end & I am also looking for Higher PR for my site(www.dbcworld.in).
    Hope for the best.
    B Biswanath,
    Webmaster,
    DBCWorld.in

  178. Folks,

    WOW… Almighty God has answered my prayers posted here 🙂

    Majority of our news sites and verticals got a boost in PR: PR6–>PR7, PR5–>PR6, PR5–>PR6, PR5–>PR6 etc…

    So now we know for sure how to get a high PR.

    Prayers combined with hard ethical SEO work 🙂

  179. Thank you Matt,

    So is possible to get two pagerank updates more this year?

    Is false that Pagerank will to disappear soon?

    regards!

  180. Hi,
    Anyone knows when Google Toolbar Completly Update.

  181. Hey Matt,

    My blog was a Pagerank 6, and now I see it 0 🙂

    I would be so shocked months ago, but now i don’t think pagerank is important for me since (as i have asked you on the previous comment) i dont understand about what is pagerank good for?

    what is it really used for? if only you could give us some little words about it Matt.

    Thanks 🙂

    *i am of course expecting my pagerank 6 back, is it perhaps because i move from www to non www?*

  182. Hello Matt,

    Thanks for the info, can you please clarify if the penalities that are expiring are the PR penalties or penalties on website rankings too.

    Thanks,
    srik

  183. Jacky asked if PR is important.

    Well, as an Affiliate Account Manager I need all the info I can get on whether to accept an affiliate on to my merchants programme and PR is one of the tools I use in making that decision.

    If you don’t monetise your sites then perhaps it is not all that important. 🙂

  184. Matt,

    How long this new pagerank will stand ? i mean when google will update pr again? next 2 months? or? is it periodically or randomize ?

  185. Hi Matt,

    Sorry this is complete offtopic.

    There seems to be something wrong with Analytics. I cannot see the dashboard when I login from my account or neither my client’s account.

    You might want to look into it.

    Thank you.

    regards,
    Zafar Ahmed

  186. what if penalties still stay? Is there chance that they expire soon?

  187. Got 1 site out of the penalty 2 days back but a number of sites I manage doesn’t show any pr change yet, will monitor in the next couple of days..

  188. Thanks for the adjustment to our PR it was a refreshing bit of good news going into the weekend. We have been recovering from years of long court proceedings that happened to our brand. This last year as you may know we re-launched Altnet.com, launched Music.kazaa.net and Vozzi.com making way for the next version of our brand. I met with Google here in AU it was hectic trying to get help with business development. We want to launch a “we are back and 100% legal” Gadget. The truth about us is we created an amazing download and upload application late 2000 and went to the labels and asked them how we could work together. The business development asked legal what to do about us that resulted in the disruption of our brand and lives. We now have distribution rights for music from Universal, Sony, EMI and, Warners. We appreciate everything you help us understand about search. The next release of our sites will clean up many code issues.

  189. –=Hey folks=– Prior to the PR update anyone else notice that the usual increase from web history in SERP and also top search queries in web master tools and in the igoogle gadget were all offline.

  190. So, in Germany we’ve got the so called “summer hole” and now everybody is busy hehe 🙂

  191. Ehi Matt. Do u know some affidable tool (not Google toolbar) about calcuate PR?

  192. I saw some changes with the pr on my websites. One website boosted from pr 0 to pr 3,another decreased from pr 1 to pr 0.
    @Dario Salvelli, you could either use google toolbar to check PR for websites you surf or you can use http://seoanalytic.com/tools/pagerank_checker/ to calculate PR for specific websites you want(without surfing to them).

  193. Hi Matt,
    Thanks for information, do it more times 🙂
    Yes, today (26 jul) some of my sites had Pagerank upgraded.

  194. Matt,

    I’ll hold off on a full report until this update is finished. It appears Google has again botched my Toolbar PageRank update for my site. (ditoweb.com)

    I don’t understand how pages that have been in your index for almost a year, that show up in the Google Webmaster Central interface as being indexed and ranked, could all the sudden go from PR3 to PR-NA.

    In fact, over 1/2 of my site (not including blog pages) is PR-NA, currently. Some have been PR NA for over 6 months (ditoweb.com/seo.html). I don’t even understand how this is possible unless you guys really don’t have your stuff together.

    I am not breaking any rules to my knowledge and I have never paid for a single link.

    The Google Webmaster Central interface and the Google Toolbar do not jive.

    I am a small site, I follow your rules, I tout your products. Where is the love?

  195. Page Rank is a load of crap that is designed to make everybody run around to googles tunes. JMHO though.

  196. The Duplicate Content Filter.

    Hi Everyone…What Does Everyone Think About The Google Duplicate Content Filter?

    My personal opinion is that The Duplicate Content Filter should have an allowance of maybe 5-10 Copies per website…this is because if you write good content on an information site…people will copy. This means that all the hard work that you have applied to your website has gone done the drain, so to speak, I think is a problem that needs to be addressed. I have an information website and everytime I write something on the site I always get at least 15 people copying my stuff. Do I have the time to write emails and complain to each person…NO
    Why? Because the internet is about sharing information without restrictions!!! Also another flaw within this is that you could sabatage a website quite easily by copying the whole website.

    So the truth is…if you write a great page for your website and people copie the page within a few weeks you will not get page rank for that page ever!!!

    I have an idea how Google can combat this quite easily so that originators of content HOLD THERE PAGERANK…You could have a Original Content Submission Page So Webmasters could submit there latest page and the spiders come and collect the Info for the webpage immediately without Discrimination. So that the originator Gets Pagerank and the rest do not OR just allow a certain number of copies (5-10) with the originator getting full pagerank and the others less. Maybe Both methods could be applied.

    Does anyone else have an opinion on this ??????????

    PAUL

  197. Dario, try the seo quake add-in for firefox it gives PR as well as lots of great information.

  198. My sites PR is reduced to 0 but the info in Payperpost remians the same as 3.
    Anyway my question is if all these blogs are made to 0 or reduced won’t it affect the sites like PPP, Amosrty etc. as well?

  199. Baruch HaShem thanks for putting my site back to PR of 6. We will do all we can to continue to earn it. It’s hard to control who links to a website. Can we report links that we do not want to count some how?

  200. Matt,

    Google keeps doing me dirty:

    Home page is not cached in Google….(ditoweb.com).

    Google Map listing for my business disappeared even though it shows active in LBC…completely wiped. I can’t find it in the map index at all. (I posted more details here: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2008/07/11/google-lbc-upgrades-business-communications/#comment-258860)

    Google Solutions Marketplace being gamed by obvious fake reviews, knocking my legit listing and reviews off the 1st page.

    The last item I can at least attempt to control…I plan asking more clients to review me this week.

    These other issues appear to be out of my hands and I have to wait on Google to fix/solve/undo the damage.

    What doesn’t make sense is why this is all happening to me?

  201. Jim; As Matt stated; take this stuff to a discussion forums who can help you. One thing though; why are you linking to some Chinese website in the footer on this page?
    ditoweb.com/seo-strategies/

    just asking. FYI; who you link out to is just as important as who links to you.

    Take this to a forums….

  202. @Doug

    The chinese site designed the theme for my blog, so I left the credit in place. That page is not one of the pages in question, infact, I am not at all concerned about my blog. (that page carries a TBPR after this update) I am concerned about the main pages of the site.

    As to the forums…I have yet to find a great place to discuss these things and get real answers. I find that having conversations on blogs to have a greater effect.

    I will take my Google Maps problem to the Google Group for that Google Product, but this visible pagerank issue, I do not know of a better place than here.

    Until I find out otherwise, this is a mistake on Google’s part. I am putting my site out there for scrutiny.

  203. @Drake:

    Great question. I never knew that there were varying degrees of PR. One thing I am really liking are all those cool videos that Cutts is doing lately. You should watch them all. I hope they pay him at G for all his blogs and videos.

    He is singlehandedly destroying Google’s horrible image in the webmaster community as a money hungry, webmaster hating brick wall of silence.

    Plus, since I have been following his advice, I am on first page for everything!!!!!!!!:-)

  204. @Jim McNelis:

    You raise a serious concern about fake reviews on GOOGLE MAPS. I am willing to bet my left nut that the vast majority of so call user reviews on Google Local are fake. Most are scumbag competitors trying to destroy legit businesses like yours.

    Other are the business owners themselves gaming the results. Let’s face it, no one is going to go out of their way to give you a 5 star rating when they have to get a Google account just to do it.

    And if they go through all that trouble it is because they have an axe to grind and want to make you look bad. Some of the reviews amount to defamation/libel and could easily get Google sued for republishing libel.

    When that libel happens, and it is a LOT, the owners panic and start writing a bunch of fake “good” reviews to try and hide the bad ones.

    The tool that allows the owner to report bad reviews is a joke, does not work and no one responds in Maps Help or at Google.

    Look at the IP address of most favorable reviews and the chances are extremely great that all good reviews are coming from the same IP.

  205. Hi Matt.
    We have a 10 year old medical web portal that had a PR6 home page for at least the last 4 years. We just noticed that our website’s home page’s Page Rank went down from PR6 to PR5 (alas) – Although some inside pages went from PR0 to PR3 and some went to PR5 . We also have almost 170,000 pages indexed in google and get approx 10,000 Search referrals from Google.com each day. So we are a little disturbed that our home page went from PR6 to PR5. Our questions are :
    (1) Could we see a further change in the PR for the home page – till the Page Rank update cycle is completed ? Hopefully we get our PR6 back for the home page.
    (2) We also found out that our webserver was down for approx 10 hours on July 25th – due to an outage at our ISP. Could this in any way also affect Page Rank ?
    (3) We have 2 domains .com and .net that are exact mirrors of each other – the .com domain is PR4 while the .net domain was PR6 (now PR5). How does this affect page rank – and should we redirect the .COM to the .net domain ?

    Thanks for any insights and tips you can give us. !

    Kumar

  206. I just don´t understand. Last week Google said I had only 35 backlinks to my site, which is weird since it is a 7 years old site. Today I went to check and it is more than 600 but the pagerank is still 0.

  207. @Claudia:

    It takes SEVERAL DAYS for the Google “Datacenters” to update the new PR data around the world.

    Be patient while Google does its obligatory “dance,” and keep in mind that SERP is more important than PR.

  208. Is the general value of the PR lower than before? I mean it’s only one parameter of hundred.

  209. Ok, I will be more patient. Thanks:)

  210. All Hail The All Mighty Google PageRank

    Within the last year or so my main website went
    from PR6 to PR4 to PR5 to PR4 again… all the
    while my keyword rankings went up or stayed the
    same within Google. My traffic has gone up. My
    income has gone up.

    Even though the last two variables are what counts
    to my bottom line… going backwards in Google PageRank
    is like getting a kick in the naughty bits. Ouch!

    It hurts – no matter how much you tell yourself PageRank
    doesn’t matter… it’s still a big blow to your psychy
    and your site’s “perceived” value.

    Google should NEVER have made those perceived “votes”
    public with the Toolbar… would have saved itself
    a lot of ill-well from webmasters.

  211. @Kumar:

    I think from what I have read, it is not PR, but the positioning you really want.

    I have seen many PR0 sites maintain top positioning to my chagrin. Google also takes factors like the age of the domain when determining positioning.

    It is my opinion that Google looks at older sites as being around before there was keyword stuffing, etc., and heavy spamming. So, as my theory goes, Google assumes an older domain won’t have spam.

    And my theory is proven by the many spammy and older legal sites I have seen with virtually no PR, who are on page 1 all the time.

    But I believe content is king. So start writing blogs and socializing as Matt says, and PR won’t matter, and in fact, will actually go up over time.

  212. I have noticed a change too. I have been using a nofollow rule and yes that works too. I’m never happy with my pagerank but it is a long term goal and I am doing it ethicly. I try not to get carried away with pagerank as its only one part of the my overall goals. Matt thanks for the update on this. Transparence is very helpful to us SEO guys.

  213. Learning as much here from the comments as the blog!

  214. Hi Matt,

    Thanks for posting the news so that we won’t sleep well for the next few days 🙂

    Well….will it be this time that my pagerank will pass Google’s ?
    It’s a 3 for now 🙂

    Take care,

    José

  215. Matt, I’ve heard a lot of newcomers (2-3 monthes for blog) got PR3 from 0. Why so quickly? What do yoг think about in general?

  216. @Matt Cutts

    “Folks, my blog is not the best place to chat about PageRank for an individual site going up or down. The various forums around the web are probably better for that.”

    Maybe you should not put announcements about google official news or changes then.

    Obviously people cannot get any real answers anywhere in the fabulous forums.

    Webmaster tools is broken. You can email webmaster tools support all you want but get no reply.

    So people see this and what do you expect?

    let’s face it. EVERY person who owns a website who wants to get noticed uses or hires SEO.

    So why not give everyone the same chance by fixing webmaster tools so it is actually a tool that works.

    If you guys made that thing work people might actually pay for features. hello 2 million or more webmasters at $20 month. Forget about SpamaNol.

    And make an official announcement board that everyone can find. not stuck in some forum or on your cat blog. C’mon, I come here to see cats and pedometers not SEO stuff.

    Take a step back and look at it from our perspective.

    You should start a new site and use the methods that are OK’d by google guidelines and try to get it ranking about the spam sites. Then if you do then you can show us, if not you can make the changes to the algorithim.

  217. Would love to hear more about these “older penalties” since I have a site that appears to have jumped up 5 spots to the #2 position. I dont want to make the same mistakes and get this penalty in the future 🙂

    This PageRank update seems very interesting to me since in the past I have had sites go down in PageRank but my serps were going up, so I didnt pay much attention to the little green bar. Now I get the word that there has been a toolbar update and check my serps and blamo up up up.

  218. Hello

    Do u think that the PR update done? and what kind of penalties are u talking about? and how to make sure i got penalties or not? and how to know them to remove causes?

  219. Great news! Can’t wait

  220. This comment relates to your statement about retiring old penalties. Before you suggest that I post this question to the Google webmaster help forum, let me just say that I already have with no responses that address this specific situation: my site suffered a rank loss penalty of seven pages after I checked my links report in Webmaster Tools and found 1,500 links to an article that I wrote that was recently distributed using i-frames by an article distribution site, http://articles.directorym.com/ , and over 1,200 links from a scraper site called http://kids-and-teens.ncomn.com/ .

    It appears that the Google filter has applied the “excessive links” penalty and possibly the “duplicate content” penalty to my site due to the sudden influx of 2,700 links from these two sites over a couple of weeks.

    I have submitted several Reconsideration Requests explaining that the article distribution links were NOT acquired in an attempt to manipulate page rank, and reported the scraper site as spam, but the penalty has remained in place for over a month now.

    My question is two-fold: does Google consider links that are generated from article distribution sites using i-frames as spam? And why am I being penalized for scraper site links that I have no control over?

    – Julie

  221. Why do you threat webmsters like this ? Why do you ban all this websites, don’t you know that we make money for leaving with them ? You just change algo, simply ban thousends of websites and that’s all – big nothing for soeone, who’s extremly rich. But remember that you kill many people by doing this – we also want to live !

  222. Thanks for the info, Here’s hoping for a PR bump 🙂

  223. Jhonny cool off mate.

    The real answers come from listening to Udi and Matt. If Matt tells us about Google docs, Word press, Content, or, not buying links its best to follow suit and not bite the hand…. Hmm… There is a lot to discuss regarding general PR that does not have to do with individual sites. seoroundtable and the like is a much better site for general complaints for an individual site. To take a guess at what happened here generally: Sites that made major changes to user pages ie. A site changed its home page so much that it was unrecognizable to Google or use geo targeting software (like maxmind) in order to prevent root DoS attacks sometimes could be confused for non compliant optimization. Many hack SEO experts buy expired URLs in order to take advantage of past PR and linking. This requires for Google to recognize page structure and penalize sites that steal URLs for page rank. It seems all sites that have demonstrated valid branding, linking and content have had PR restored.

    Maybe I am wrong but, I appreciate all the same this PR update ; )

  224. In my short blogging career, this was the first time for me to know that Google will update TBPR in a dvance.With this development, I hope that the next TBPR update will take place at the end of October.Not so, Matt?

    Why can’t you just come up with site detailing the roadmap of TBPR updates?

  225. In my short blogging career, this was the first time for me to know in advance that Google will update TBPR.With this development, I hope that the next TBPR update will take place at the end of October.Not so, Matt?

    Why can’t you just come up with site detailing the roadmap of TBPR updates?

  226. Any chance of addressing the questions posed about the penalties that are expiring?

    I’m still interested to know if filing a reinclusion request is necessary or are penalized web sites ever reviewed without a request from the site owner/webmaster?

    I’ve been working on a penalized site for close to a year now trying to improve/increase the content, remove any outbound links to sites that may also be penalized, as well as trying to have previously paid and other inbound links removed (difficult task to say the least).

    I’m not sure what other issues I might need to address, and I’m a bit reluctant to file a reinclusion request in case I’m missing something. Never know how that might be perceived at the plex.

    I hear too many webmasters complaining about being unable to get a site back into the index even after multiple requests.

  227. Dave (original)

    Maybe you should not put announcements about google official news or changes then.

    Maybe you should read the BIG BOLD text before posting.

    I feel sure that most here actually appreciate Matt’s posts on HIS PERSONAL blog.

    If you stop obsessing over PR, you will find time to actually earn it and will probably live longer and sleep better.

  228. Why does Google Update their toolbar PR tool separately to their internal PR ranking mechanisms? Matt what do you mean when you say: ‘we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.’ ?

    Google PR is a very clever think, but it can sometimes be mysterious!

  229. Maybe you should read the BIG BOLD text before posting.

    I don’t see cat’s in the bold letter.

    Anyway, I don’t care about pagerank. It does not matter for ranking it seems.

    It only really matters if you want to sell links and that’s not allowed right?

    I like matt discussing SEO. I mean he knows a his stuff obviously. We all come here to pick his brain. But why announce something here like this if he does not want people asking more questions like “what penalties”were removed.

    Some people depend on their sites for income. When they get slapped by mistake by the 800lb gorilla and then cannot get ahold of

    I think this was more of a link bait she me my Matt. haha

    Maybe he is selling links for the pedometer?

  230. good news, but my pr was promoted very slow, maybe i’m too lazy??

  231. Oh, you’re so helpfull for seo-companies ! that’s so great ! Especially when you ban random websites, who’s next ? My business was destroyed last week, remember – if your live depends on Google – like mine – you can be next ! Google don’t respect anyones ! They just serch and destroy !

  232. Penalties ? You think this is a game ? No – this is real live ! You can lose everything, you WILL lose everything – it’s just a matter of time ! Google’ll destroy averyone !

  233. By the way, not dogging on Matt’s pedometer post. He has some pretty cool stuff. How do you have time for all this stuff?

    Now I have seen it all. I won’t say the name of the site. Maybe it’s known but is funny how blatent the site is about “selling pagerank”

    He bags on SEO’s so if you want the url Matt just email me 🙂

  234. Emilie Buffiere

    Quote: “expiring some older penalties on websites”

    Does that mean one of the following:
    (1) Those website who have cleaned their act, are back in index?
    OR
    (2) Something that might have penalized a site in past, is not worth penalty today?

    MATT, will really appreciate if you can give us some info about this.
    Thanks a lot 😛

  235. i’ll download that toolbar as soon as it will be released

  236. ha ha, i bet matt really regrets posting this now :mrgreen: guys, in fairness matt has done his best to reply to people… he was good enough to give us a heads up on PR but if you keep firing questions at him like this (a lot unrelated) he may think again before he posts about PR…

    pagerank is important, but if you build a site around pagerank and it’s such a huge issue for you, you have to question whether or not your site is worthy of a high/higher PR in the first place.

  237. @ Jhonny:

    I think Page Rank is Google’s way of telling you whether they trust you. I don’t think it is for selling links. It was perverted at some time.

    It may be time to come up with another system, but with no follow, I think were ok.

  238. Matt, That is great to know. I personally love the pagerank toolbar and anticipating its update. I simply track the trends from time to time and for me, it gives me a sense whether or not as a webmaster I am doing the correct things for my website in the eyes of Google. I believe this is a good indicator of web site content progression.

  239. Julie Tuggle, I wouldn’t worry about the article links; I think we handle those appropriately.

  240. Matt, Jonathan with the Google Webmaster Tools team indicated that “I was getting on the right track” with the sudden appearance of 2,700 links from these two sites being interpreted as a link scheme by Google: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Tools/browse_thread/thread/81cdaa8d1340b9e2/a677e81fdc8ba2be?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=jtuggle#a677e81fdc8ba2be

    So I asked my article distribution site to take down all my article links. I’ve been over my links report in Webmaster Tools several times and nothing else except for the sudden appearance of the 1,500 article distribution site links and the 1,200 scraper site links to my site could account for a seven page rank loss penalty to my site.

    A seven page permanent drop in my site’s rankings after eight years on page one is not a normal algorithm fluctuation. My site has had this rank loss penalty now for over a month – with no response to multiple Reconsideration Requests I have filed through my Webmaster Tools account.

  241. @panzermike :

    Yes, I do agree that SERPs are more important to anyone with a website than PR itself. But PR is an indicator of Google’s perception of a site’s authority and a drop in PR can and does affect SERPs for the more competitive and generic keywords. Single word, generic keywords ( like health or medicine) – which are high search volume – always return a high PR website – which is why wikipedia generally comes up in Number 1 position for these sort of generic searches. That is what we are concerned about.

  242. Matt,

    Are you going to provide us with some information regarding the penalties?

    I’m not concerned with PR, just looking for some more info regarding the penalties.

  243. @Kumar:

    I have heard other wise. Where did you hear that PR is needed for more competitive keywords?

    The net is growing, so you cannot rely upon old techniques. Matt is hot on bookmarking, so that means you should be too. Match and mirror.

  244. Matt,

    The green theme for this blog suits this “green” announcement, for you have stopped thousands of forum posters speculating in one of those perennial “Is there/Isn’t there a PR update going on?” threads.

    Some people might not be aware that a few other third party tools send browser data to Google, e.g. the SearchStatus add-on for FF.

    Ash

  245. Dave (original)

    Anyway, I don’t care about pagerank.

    Evidently you DO 🙂

  246. I have a “simple” question related to the subject of this post.

    If we have to file a reinclusion request and Google sees that a site is ok and nothing is against its own terms, is the penalty lifted immediately or we have to wait for any penalty to “expire”? Is it usually days, weeks, months or years?

    When we are accused of making a criminal offense in real life, we are told exactly what we done wrong (have time to defend ourselves, maybe we are not even guilty) and at least know for how long we will be in prison.

    Thanks Matt for trying to shed some light with your blog.

  247. nice blog…well i live in the uk, its the 28th today….i thought id have a break over the weekend from doing seo…and it looks like i bloody missed out a pr update!!! well my site is now a pr2 which is better than a pr1!

    still love google….sort of 😛

  248. Hooray, my site jumped from PR3 to PR4. That’s an overall of PR4 after just six months online wearing white hat only …

  249. Can you expand a little more on your initial blog post about the new Google toolbar PageRank values — there has been a lot of buzz recently over at Squidoo with regards to lenrank and the mysterious algorithms that are being implemented. I must admit that in grade school and into high school and college that math was my strong suit, but I don’t have an adequate handle on the various algorithms and how a bit of tweaking can skew rankings.

    Oh — I am a first-time commenter to your blog and will be bookmarking you to check back. Great to see you will be using twitter more.

    –Jaguar Julie

  250. Missed this announcement and was pleasantly surprised when i came into work today to notice we had finally got our green back after transferring TLD.

    Gonna keep my eye out for the expiration in penalities too 😉

    Thanks for keeping us updated.

  251. Thank You Google

    Well Matt this is the BEST news i have heard in 3 years. Yes that how long one of my sites was by penaltied by Google.

    I always suspected i was.. Know i know.

    Thank God for Google expiring some older penalties on websites

  252. Matt, Thank you informing me of the next PR update. Thanks for the Green!

  253. Can you say few words about Microsoft’s BrowseRank?

  254. hi, matt,

    i’m really getting confused about PR NOW.
    I have PR 0 website and then suddenly turns to a PR 5…

    could that really be possible.. without going to at least the lower PR value?
    How do Google evaluate a site to give it a PR, per link basis? my site is not even on the upper fold (top 3) on my target keywords.

    I’m just amazed and surprised with how all of these works!

  255. The page rank system itself is saturated with flaws. It was quite logical if scrutinizing the system in the time when spamming was still in control and web masters were still sincere in including outbound links in their sites in the accordance of the relevance and quality of the sites.

  256. Matt,

    It would be nice if all webmasters could be told exactly what they have done wrong in GWT…
    Like many others webmasters, my website is under penalty since 20th april 2008 more than 3 months, and I still don’t know why…

    It’s very hard for a webmaster who works hard everyday to see his website going down and down in serp whithout knowing the reasons of the penalty. It’s possible that we have done wrong but please tell what to do to be good.

    More than 3 months, my website is ranking down, i just want to know why my website is under penalty and when will the penalty will expire ?

    Thank you for your answer Matt.

  257. Many of us are confused:

    Are some “older” penalties not a penalty any longer? I’m not asking for specifics, but maybe some insight about what triggered the change.

    One guy above said had to wait 3 years. Why did some penalties on websites expired now and not before?

  258. Paul Said,

    “My personal opinion is that The Duplicate Content Filter should have an allowance of maybe 5-10 Copies per website…this is because if you write good content on an information site…people will copy. This means that all the hard work that you have applied to your website has gone done the drain, so to speak, I think is a problem that needs to be addressed. I have an information website and everytime I write something on the site I always get at least 15 people copying my stuff.”

    Happen to me as well. Some bugger just copy and paste my content on their blog.

  259. Thank you again Matt ! I’m going to talk about your update to my French guys.

  260. Thanks for the update – it’s almost like the ‘weather report’ that Yahoo! do 🙂

  261. Well here it is – 4 days after your post. I just checked the PR for a couple sites I maintain including my blog and my new company’s site… but since I haven’t checked PR in so long, I don’t know if my PR went up or down or stayed the same, let alone whether it’s been “a few days” yet!

    AAAAAAHHHHHH

    Here’s where I’m really confused about PR – Google doesn’t refresh the toolbar except every few months. So why show it at all? It’s stale data except for short periods of time.

    So many people use it both as if it’s fresh data and critically important – isn’t that unfair business practices? (No offense Matt – I personally have a special place in my heart for Google – especially since one of my client’s sites when I took over the SEO two years ago was banned from Yahoo when I came on board and on the 15th page of Google at best…. and since I took over and re-vamped the site, it’s all over the 1st page organically at Google but never came out of the basement at Yahoo…

    Anyhow – back to PR – to me personally it’s like the phony Alexa rankings based on their limited flawed extrapolation formulas… only from a nicer company…

  262. Real Good News!

    I Hope it will do some good to my website. My website PageRank was PR6 a year+ ago and now its PR5 , don’t know why my pagerank was dropped 1 down. Since then i have made lots of improvements and really hope to see some increase.

    Also, i have read your iphone hack post , is the method is fail safe??? will 3G iphone will work with any carrier?

  263. PR changes? Who cares- Means Nothing! Worthless information. By the time the changes are live they will already be something else. Updates are too infrequent Matt. Get your team to update PR daily.

  264. Haha never buy a Website 4 days before Google update their PR 😉 Went to sleep posessing a flourishing PR3 Link Directory and woke up to a desserted tumbleweed ridden PR1 Homepage 🙁 hahaha!! Looks like i got my work cut out building up those backlinks ready for the next update!

    Take Care fellow SEO’s

  265. Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing

    Thanks Matt. I bet a lot of SEOs now feel like little kids being let out of the Time Out room. If they screw up again, you should send them to bed without dinner.

  266. I still haven’t seen changes on any of my sites, but then again, it’s just page rank 😀

  267. there is no change on my blog either

  268. Hi Matts. I’d like to know why the domain name of a site is so important? This does not generate a huge amount of spam sites? Sites with keywords and not content inside? For example, companies are having to create domains (name + activity) to stand out from spammers.

    I prefer to enter http://www.mcdonalds.com than having to enter http://www.mcdonaldsfastfood.com

    In the future all sites will have to change your name?

    Thanks and congratulations for your job.

  269. Please share a bit more detail regarding “…we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.”

    I ask because 6 months ago my company handed me a “cold-case” project…figure out why a site we launched in Dec. of 2005 has never ranked on Google.

    Today….yippee! It’s ranking! The question is…why? Is it because of all the changes I’ve made over the past 6 months? (mostly undoing crazy over-optimization schemes attempted by those before me)

    Or could I have spent the last 6 months playing RE5 and doing Yaeger shooters while watching Van Damme v. Seagal marathons and still gotten the same result?

    (If it’s the latter, try an keep your response on the down-low, as word is I’m in for a big bonus for all my hard work. wink wink)

  270. hello Matt

    From My point of view google should remove PAGE RANK option from google Bar,,, All problem in SEO industries arise with this Page rank Option, yahoo and MSN do not have Page Rank option, are they not good SE.?

    I love GOOGLE , side by sde I don not want to see miss-use of Page rank bar, al ot of Website Owner getting Fool because of only this page rank opting.
    it totally my privet views ..
    thanks

  271. At least PR updates are better compared to the past when Google just started. However, do not be too obsessed with the PR bar and lose your focus on ranking well.

  272. My pagerank is better than before for one site but the other is still 0. I think I will have to wait for the next update.
    And I hope Google don´t do anything bad to my PR now. It is a very clean site with content and no advertising.

  273. Matt, I wanted to follow up on your comment on July 24 that Google will be retiring old penalties over the next few days. After examining my links report in Google Webmaster Tools I had removed the links that would have caused the seven page ranking penalty in the SERPs to be applied to my site. And then after that, I removed over 1200 scraper page links from one site and over 1500 article links from another site. I’m really running out of links to remove and still my site has a seven page penalty in the SERPs. I’ve posted this issue on the Google Webmaster forum here: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Tools/browse_thread/thread/81cdaa8d1340b9e2/a677e81fdc8ba2be?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=jtuggle#a677e81fdc8ba2be , and sent multiple reconsideration requests, but still no response. Is there no one on the Google Webmaster Tools team who can address this issue?

    – Julie

  274. Emilie Buffiere

    Hi Julie,

    Whilst we understand your concerns, it’s clear that nor Matt Cutts, nor Google ever give clear indications what is actually wrong when a penalty is imposed. In most cases, we are simply forwarded to their general guidelines, which although very clear still leave questions unanswered.

    You think it’s the links that caused your penalty, what if it isn’t? Maybe you simply have to wait for your penalty to ‘expire’ as Matt indicated here.

    Wish you best of luck.

  275. That was nice. Maybe that is trend of the future for Google to give us a heads up. I employ 8 to 10 people that all depend on Google rankings so literally one day with a ?Google update they could lose their job. It would be nice to certain things are coming. Thanks Matt!

  276. Emilie, since Matt’s July 24 blog post stated that Google will be retiring old penalties within the “next few days”, let just say for argument’s sake, my sudden seven page penalty in the SERPs was applied to my site for some other reason than being due to the sudden spike of over 2,700 links all pointing to my site from only two urls (which is more than enough to qualify for a big “excessive links” penalty.)

    If so, then it stands to reason that no sooner than the penalty was “retired”, it would be reapplied to my site the next time the Googlebot crawled my site and the Google algorithm detected the same “mystery violation” to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

    I attend those on-line Webmaster Tools forums given by folks like Michael ‘Wysz’ Wyszomierski, only to find out they don’t want to be bothered with complaints that this program offers no support whatsoever to webmasters who are following the “rules” of Google Webmaster Guidelines and submitting their Reconsideration Requests as directed. And that is because no one from Google ever bothers to respond to the Reconsideration Requests or even to specific questions posted on the Google Webmaster “Help” forum.

    Matt, instead of publishing your SEO conference schedule for the year and asking us “what is there to do in Los Angeles?”, how about talking to us about fixing the BROKEN Webmaster Help Forum and Webmaster Tools Account programs?

    – Julie

  277. Hello,

    My precedent comment has been deleted and I hope this one will stay…

    Totally agree with Julie.

    Indeed, my website is also under penalty and I still don’t know why. I really think I’m ok with all webmaster’s guidelines…

    It would be very nice if webmasters could be “helped” by Google on Webmaster Help Forum or GWT in order to do the right things to stop the penalty.

  278. Emilie Buffiere

    Julie thinks she got penalized because of the sudden increase in links pointing to her website, but I still believe it’s not the case. If that was true, then our competitors can simply point thousands of new links to us all and we are immediately penalized. As far as I know, such links are devaluated at most. At least that is what extremely renowned people in the seo industry are preaching.

    That’s why I also agree with Julie and others here, that webmasters should be informed what is wrong with their website. Google is no perfect machine (nothing is perfect), and many innocent webmasters are penalized too!

    I’m almost pretty sure, they will keep ignoring us and reply directly only to a selected handful. It’s a pity that we really too much on one search engine.

    I’m a Google fan btw, but what happened to Julie can happen to me tomorrow!

  279. Unfortunately I seem to have been clobbered by this. I haven’t been black hatting or spamming and I have clean original content. Unfortunately I found out about this happening when I was pitching to a client and told him to look up my keywords:(.

    One of the real problems I have is that a lot of the index amounts for my keywords have massively increased and there is a LOT of blackhat stuff in there.

    I’m still staying whitehat but there is a part of me that wonders about thowing in the towel and just generating blogs all day with google adsense all over them instead!

  280. Anyone know if PR sculpting is still a popular practice? If so is it effective for White Hat SEO or is it a Black Hat technique? I recently heard about it and wondered if anyone else might know if this type of approach to increasing a pages PR is against the Google TOS.

  281. Is PR update still going on. There are many webmasters claimed that there PR have been changed today.. Please Tell me.. Thanks.

  282. Who really cares what google does anymore. They are only messing up peoples life by trying to redo something thats not broken so why bother. If you really rely on that little green bar then you will fail. The only real way to make money online these days is to SPAM and SPAM a lot. I use to do everything right. NO SPAMMING, only white hat sites etc but then one day google messed us over really bad by removing us from their index… I had to survive so we resorted to SPAMMING and we have tripled our income so to hell with google and SPAM it baby.

  283. Matt, in reference to your comment above that Google handles article links appropriately, could you please review this summary of events that lead up to a Google duplicate content penalty being applied to my site and the penalty not being removed until the article links were taken down and no longer included in my Google incoming links report: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/c2a75d627b50f60/8dec3a012630821d?hl=en&q=jtuggle#8dec3a012630821d

    Googler Jonathan Simon suggested that I was probably right that the duplicate article links had caused the penalty, which is why I removed them. Would you or Jonathan please suggest the correct way to submit article links to an article distribution site so that the Google filter does not misinterpret the links as SPAM?

    PS: I’ve asked this question every way I know how on the Google Webmaster Help forum and no one had been able to answer this question. Would you please address this issue on either the Webmaster Help Forum or as a separate article on the Google Webmaster Central Blog?

    – Julie

  284. I think it would be better if PageRank was published at fixed regular intervals say every 3 months. This would make it easier for SEO people to monitor the performance of their websites wrt to PR

  285. Matt, just wondering howcome the PR update has been so frequent for the past 3 months – each month once?

    Is there a new algorithm that Google is using to update PR monthly?

  286. Hi Matt,
    just following on from Michael Woo, I have noticed that toolbar PR has just changed again recently for my site, it looks far more frequent than it used to be. Is this the norm now ?

    On a side note:
    I have also noticed that PR sculptig works, and is very worth doing. It is somethig I highly recomend to all. Why have a PR on a contact page or a galley. It is more important to get the important pages of your website rather than non important content pages.

    Keep up the good work, informing us of algo changes. There are webmasters who want to follow the Google guidelines !!!

  287. Why am I reading here that there have been periodic updates, yet I haven’t seen them and some sites that monitor just this are saying we are at an all time record of 280 days without a Google update.

  288. Hi Matt,
    Can you give me us an update on the current situation with page rank. Do you know why its been excluded from google chrome?

  289. Wow! I have never really gone through the comment sections on this topic, but the number of people who are pr crazy is phenomonal.

  290. Matt, about the “truncated histograms of stuff” –

    Could you find out for us webmasters what the High, Medium & Low pagerank values on Google Webmaster Tools mean?

    I know you have no use for it but we do and it would be nice if you could help us out… I’m sure quite a lot of webmasters would like to know 🙂

    Thanks!

  291. Hello Elad,

    The pagerank values within Google’s webmaster tools are as follows:

    High: PR from 8 to 10
    Medium: PR from 5 to 7
    Low: PR from 0 to 4

    Obviously Unranked clearly indicates and unranked website,

    Hope this helps : )

  292. If 0-4 is considered low then I wonder what would be the percentage of all sites falling into that category. My guess would be 80% to 90% of all websites.

  293. Hey Matt,
    I’ll skip all the debate and just ask when the next PR update is coming? It’s funny that a lot of people talk about a lack of relevance, depends on how you look at it, the major advertising industry mag in Australia uses it as one of the 5-7 criteria to generate the top 50 Aussie digital/marketing blogs list that i’m hoping to get onto in July this year! 🙂

  294. Matt can we assume there is going to be an update every 3 months?

  295. BL The last update was on 22.03.2009
    This means PR update MAY come in short but not necessarily.

  296. A lot of people thing that PageRanks does not matter but I think that as long as PR as initials exist they WILL matter

  297. Hi Matt, I know that you dont wish to talk about pr, but the forums don’t seem to know whats going on. My site just took a drop from pr6 to pr3, (luomapinyin.com) I have never sold a link before and my site has chinese info that no other web has. I also have many high one-way links from universitys. It doesn’t seem to have lost its rank on all the key word searches, which is great. But, why would my site get penalized?

  298. The Page Rank doesn’t concern me as much as the fact that my traffic is down to less than half of what it was before July 1 2009. I can’t figure out why.

  299. @Dee, it is the holiday season my friend. I experience a similar drop in traffic during the summer months.

    Keep an eye out on Google Webmaster tools to ensure there are no crawling or outages on your site.

  300. @Dee, Yes I think Rob is right. You must check your Google Webmaster Tools setting, or check your website for any recent changes you made.

    Cheers 🙂

  301. Too bad Chrome doesn’t show us the PR yet.
    Although you can add a bookmarklet to bookmarks bar, it isn’t the same.

  302. I can’t tell you how ‘fascinating’ PageRanks have been to me — it’s like beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

  303. Hi Matt, its been over a month since you wrote post but i cannot witness pagerank update. I believe last update was happened in end of may, so adding 3 months to that comes to aug. end.

  304. Zenil: Over a month? Try over a year.

  305. It seems like pagerank is a mystery to all but those who look at and write the algorithms for it. I have been looking for a reliable guide as to what Google would like to see, so as to reward your hard work with a good pagerank. I haven’t found one yet. However I do appreciate the updates as to the update of the Google pagerank toolbar. If there is a guide to help regarding best practices for increasing pagerank though I would love to have that information.

  306. I think there are good reasons why Google doesn’t want everyone to know how their algorithms work. Google’s main goal is to try and order results according to how popular sites are. People are doing all sorts of things to manipulate the algorithm as it is–it would just get worse if everyone know exactly what triggered the algorithm.

    Google is in a funny position. On the one hand, it wants to rate sites naturally based on how popular they are. But on the other hand, just the act of rating a site now affects that site’s popularity! I know some people downplay the importance of PageRank these days but I have concrete examples for some of my sites where a PR bump would mean more traffic.

    And the main reason I came here is that I too am trying to find out why there hasn’t appeared to be any PR updates forever. At least, none of the sites I monitor have shown any change. What’s going on?

  307. Hi, This is great post and thanks for telling us about google updates but I want to know next update I have some new websites and I hope they got pr 3 .

  308. Did anyone else notice a pr update today 12/30/09? I cleaned up my internal linking structure by adding the backslash to all internal links to make my site uniform and my site jumped 2 spots on the same day. Is it possible that I had my pr split among the different pages that had slashes and those that didn’t? I am very keenly aware of the canonicalization problem though spelling it has been a challenge, and I am pretty sure that because of this experience, that everyone should be keeping better track of their internal links.

  309. I just noticed that Google adjust the PageRank of sites within the last hour or so, as evidenced by the change in the Google Toolbar. I have worked tirelessly to add credible and informative data to my site, and to earn backlinks from authorative sites. Yet for some reason my site’s pagerank went down, from a 3 to a 2. This is surprising, as I have seen other sites that are brand new start out with a 3 as of tonight that were previously unranked. This is odd, since I know we have way more credibility in the world than these new sites, yet they are ranking higher with regards to toolbar PageRank. Could you provide some insight on how to move from a 3 to a 4, instead of from a 3 to a 2?

  310. i saw a PR update in october and in december . is PR update now monthly or once every 2 month ?

  311. Hi, I have seen a few sites drop in Page rank since December and I was wondering what the reason was. I guess we all need to work on getting quality links to our sites from reputable and authoritative sites… I am also interested to hear what Matt thinks of how to move up from 2-3 or from 3-4… Your input is much appreciated…!!

  312. I too have seen sites PageRank drop, I’ve also seen others go up. I guess you could assume that if yours goes down that the type of techniques you’re using to get your site out there are not looked upon well by Google. Or… perhaps you had sites that were linking to you and their PR went down, thus causing your site to also go down. Or perhaps yet another option could be that they added way more links thus diluting the PR that was pushing to your site.

    In other words. Build out good quality content that people actually like and you’ll be well rewarded for it.

  313. Seems that Im not the only victim of the vanity bar aka the Google Pagerank Toolbar, I find it very useful as a site assessor and tend not to take sites seriously if they have a TBPR of 0, Have seen plenty of sites that are nearly brand new / pre-launch get a TBPR of 2 which amazes me sometimes, would like the TBPR updates to be a bit more frequent, surely all your new hardware allows you to do this now.

  314. Hi Matt,
    Thanks for this post, As I’m a big fan of yours, love to see this post.
    Actually Current Page-rank option in Google’s tool bar has both the right and wrong effects on webmasters. The right thing is, If PR bar responds at any website, the webmasters or the SEO experts don’t need to check the website whether it is on Google’s Cache or not…. ha ha…
    And obviously the wrong effect of this tool is all the reckless competition among webmasters.
    So I think, PR tool has the bad effect than then its utility.
    Thanks a lot…

  315. It seems that today (June, 4 – 2010) Google is updating it’s pagerank toolbar. Did you know how many days does Google take to complete the pagerank updates?

  316. So the last google pr updates was on June, 4 -2010?

  317. The thing to note is that the pr update is just what shows on the bar after all the information has been assembled previously by google. The results don’t change. A loss is pr would have hurt you earlier and not just when the green bar changes!

  318. I think this is a great tool to use for analyzing websites however how accurate are the PR values?

  319. Hi, this is a really great post about google pagerank updates but I want to know more for the toolbar update. Thank you!

  320. Hello,
    thanks a lot for your message. Although I have been for a while trying to figure out when during the year should I expect the new toolbar PageRank values I am not sure if there is a seasonal pattern of it or instead it happens when Google decides that it is time for it. If you could provide some insights about the overall expected timing of toolbar PageRank values would be indeed useful.
    Thanks a lot!

  321. I’ve also been noticing how PR floats up and down a lot. Everyone do the Google Dance! 🙂

  322. I also think this is a great tool to use for analyzing websites, I am not reall concerned about accuracy, I thibk an indication of PR should be good enough, is that right?.

  323. Hey Matt,
    In this post were you refering to the page rank update which happened on Jun 27th 2011 or is there any other updates coming in near future?

  324. Hi, last summer when my site was more accesible and I had thousands of backlinks I had lower PR than now when I have not backlinks and few visitators for nearly six months. My question is … if that is now displayed in a few months ago, or what ? I cannot explain .. I’m waiting answers

  325. Hi, Thanks for this post. this is Matt Johnson I was wondering does Google give preference to a site that is being tracked from webmaster tools, or one that has Google analytics?

    I think a site with analytics probably has a better chance of getting indexed becasue google knows about it . Get found in Google

  326. My sites get indexed pretty much with me doing nothing at all! My last site no backlinks or anything indexed in 4 days. If i linked it somewhere I bet it would have been indexed in a few hours.

  327. Thanks Matt I use this so that when this happens again no wrong and can improve on the things that I serve. The only thing I would do differently explained, would have faced the bone side of the optical business. But very good article and is well.
    See you soon

  328. Hopefully I’ll see only positive PR ratings… Penalties are no bueno 🙁 However, change is always expected within the world of SEO and catching on to New Algorithms can be challenging but rewarding when it comes to the competition out there..

  329. That’s great to hear. So, I’m expecting my PR 3 back =) (Hoping for a PR 4 at most.) But anyway PR is weighted less nowadays. Anyway, its nice that we are all hoping for a Pagerank raise 😉

  330. Hi Matt,

    I’ve long suspected there’s some kind of madlibs for PR that all these companies use.

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