In case you didn’t see where I confirmed it on Twitter, Google recently did a toolbar PageRank update. It’s pretty much done now. If you want more info, I’ve answered questions about PageRank and the Google Toolbar in the past.
I predict that this will be the last toolbar PageRank update of 2008. 
{ 69 comments… read them below or add one }
Happy new year!
新年快乐！
No kidding !!
Maybe there is another update !! 2008 is not finished yet
Matt,
You went WAAAY out on a limb with that prediction.
But, I noticed you didnt predict we have seen the last PR ROLLBACK of 2008
,Michael Martin
Matt,
Thats the best news you can bring to JohnMu who is really in love with TBPR updates
Wish you, Mrs Cutts, Emmy and Oz a happy and prosperous 2009.
Looks like PageRank has been revalued like mortgage based securities. As near as I can tell, I’m down to one PR=5 page left in the world. I remember the old days when I had dozens of PR=6 pages and everybody wanted to own bank stocks. I wonder if there’s a connection -should we declare the end of the PageRank bubble?
Morris
Thanks Matt. Have a great New Years bro!
Morris Rosenthal, we always reserve the right to improve and update how we determine PageRank.
Thanks Harith, and I hope everyone has a Happy New Years!
I will also chime in with a “Happy New Year Matt”.
2008 was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to 2009. I have a feeling it will be an exciting year.
Matt,
Wasn’t bragging or complaining, just reminiscing. In fact, I noticed a couple months ago that WebMaster Tools went back to showing a little slice of blue in “High” PageRank distribution even for my newer site, something I’d requested for psychological reasons through some Google feedback channel or another, so maybe they listened:-)
Morris
happy new year to you and your family.
Happy New Year !
Looks like i need to change whatever i am doing ie unique content, images, products… page rank has tanked from pr3 to just pr 1 tonight
….and i was hoping to pack my real job in next year – best send that new engraving machine back to lapland.!)
Oh well just off to grab some pans and bash them together as loud as possible, yes that’s what we brits on NYE! (it is the credit crunch after all!)
Oh any tips on what i’m doing wrong would be really appreciated….
Happy New Year Matt. Even though we don’t know each other thanks for sharing some great stuff
David
Thank you Matt for sharing that info.
Wish You A Very Happy And Prosperous New Year.
Wish you a Happy new year ! This is google’s New year Gift. I wonder after 3 months will it be fools day???
Yes thanks Matt. I have been following your tweets and Mixxing them. Ha.
Hey Matt.
I realize you don’t have a lot of time. (I often get a pretty hefty load of emails myself.)
However, I heard that it’s best to have your main content area display in your html first over basically everything else. Do you know whether or not this is true?
Something about content being more powerful when displaying at the top of the HTML.
Let me know if you get the chance.
Also, does Google crawl CSS files? I’m using blogger so the CSS is taking up the majority of my space.
Happy New Years Matt and thanks for the info on the tbpr update havent been following pr to much will have to keep an eye out for the new improvement.
You are right, Matt. That was the last toolbar PageRank update of 2008
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Wish You Happy New Year and High Pagerank for Your Blog
I no likey this one Matt … no likey at all
Happy New Year Matt, i am off to investigate the changes and see if they affect my life – they always do!
Emma
XX
Oh sweet jebus. Can I just say Matt, I totally dred it when you update us on GTPR, because I know my MD will come across this and stop looking at how much traffic/conversions G SE traffic has given to our clients and look more closely at this.
On a more positive note, I don’t see anything lower than it was as a cursory glance for our clients, so… *phew*!
Matt Listen here, I don’t know what the hell Google did to it’s algorithm, but I don’t believe the fact that my PR didn’t change after getting so many high quality backlinks from major sites. Is Google still updating the PR of blogs or is it over?
Any reason why didn’t mine change ? This seems totally weird.
Thanks for the update Matt. I hope Google can update the PageRank often. It gives us a good glimpse of how much progress we are making to improve the popularity and ranking of our site.
Hope it can be a monthly affair in 2009.
A Very Happy New Year to You and your family.
Best Regards,
Vinai
Happy new year, Matt, and greetings from Germany.
Thanks for the update! Happy New Year!
Great news
All the sites I manage have a better PR ….
Happy new year from Spain !
Luis
Ah we got it. Few info on this update though!
Happy new year 2009 Matt. 2009 would be a year of duplicate content!
Matt, you have told me in the past that TBPR is popular with users who are NOT SEO, Webmasters or anything to do with Websites. So, why does Google ONLY update TBPR once in a while and REAL PR perpetually? Is that misleading your users?
BTW. I think you know, but I would like to see TBPR dropped altogether. It IS the sole reason for at least 10% of my spammy emails and has the SEO World obsessed with it and ruining honest businesses on the Web.
Hi Matt:
This is great information. I am fairly new to SEO and blogging and Im trying to take all the information in that my mind can handle. I will bookmark your site. Looks like a lot more for me to learn.
Thanks!! Happy New Year!!!
Robin
thanks a lot for the information .
Hi Matt,
I would like to know whether the calculated values of PageRank are conserved? I mean, if you take the PageRank values from every page of the internet then the sum of them add to 1.
Ouch, dropped from a 4 to a 3 and I was hoping for a 5! Got close to a thousand more quality backlinks (paid for none), added hundreds of pages to my site and the ranking went down! Wish there was some reason to know why, makes no sense.
a happy new year!
あけましておめでとう！
i think it is the way how dave said:
it should be dumped, since everybody tries to get a better pagerank, but it doesn’t correlate with the amount of visitors or real relevance of an entire domain.
regards
raimund
I’ve got a site that has had amazing traffic, tons of link backs, lots of updates, very relevent… and it dropped in pagerank. Thank you Google for confusing the crap out of me
I didn’t like this update too much…
Matt, first I enjoy reading your posts… As far as page rank is concerned, as an SEO I see it as fools gold. All links are good links. Quality links with relevance is even better! I don’t waste a lot of time with PR checks, but I did download it and admit I glance at it each time I build a back link.
All the best,
Shane
What’s up with the images-update? Usually a pagerank update includes an images-update – this is my experience. But this time I can not find new images. Whats going on?
Cool, this is the second update for my site – and its a PR2 already
Happy new year btw
Matt – our very new blog Technology-Report.com, started a few months ago, shows a toolbar PR4 but still nothing shows in regular SERPS. I didn’t think that was possible.
We did verify at Webmaster Central and did initially have a lot of duplicated content from my old blog, imported via WP, but I have erased the old posts and placed them at the new blog.
well done everybody that managed to get good PR
and happy new year
Sadly, I have yet to see my PR rise from a rubbish 0…
Hi Matt,
Well…mine hasn’t moved for months.
But I’m going for a PR11
To all of you, I wish a prosperous 2009
José
For all those wanting a higher PR, use
“”
In the header section.
Be careful NOT to exceed 10 though, else it wont work. Also, it can take up to 4 Months to work, so be patient.
Oops, use;
Damn! Last try;
I don’t bother too much with PR, it was 4, 3 and now it’s 0. Screw it.
Great prediction! As always, thanks for the update…Now we know Twitter is faster than RSS!
why publish PR??? by publishing PR, G provides blackhat webmasters incentive to try to figure out how to game the big G. when will G put the PR kitty back into the bag??
Hi Matt !!
First of all “Happy new Year”
This is really such a nice post, nd yeah ! I did saw in the end day of 2008 that PR is updated.
Actually second last update of PR did decrease my PR of the website but current update are gave me happiness.
I found that my all website PR are increased. Its 0 to 3.
Any way will hope we get this type of hottest news from ur side.
One more things what abt the Mayers (Google Employee) ? Is he going to leave Google ??
Thanks,
PM Anavaratham
Hello Matt,
I wish you a happy new year!
But i would also want to ask you something.
In all the years my site is online (dmoz listed poem site) Google bot toke my normal descriptions and titles and not the one from DMOZ. But now suddenly all my titles and descriptions are gone for my category pages. Only the index has a dmoz description and the title of the index is my website domain name. Today i added in my
Is this enough to get al my titles and descriptions back in the serps for my category pages and my index?
Is it a bug in a new algo?
Could you please respond because all my category pages are gone from the serps (i think because of this issue)
Kind regards,
Marco
Some code fell away
Today i added in my head “noodp”
Figured when Google bot slowed down there had to be a PR update going on.
Watch site dropped from PR3 to PR2.
Didn’t affect anything much though.
Hi Matt,
Sometimes I don’t understand Google Indexing.
I have created a new site on December 2008.
Google gave it a good indexation starting on 21 Dec.
But sometimes it completely disappears from the page results returning 2 days after on the same position.
Why does Google Indexing makes my site disappears and appears for no special reason.
Regards
Manuel
I went from 0 to 1 so i am happy. The site needs a lot more work so it would not deserve more then 1.
Hello Matt,
Thanks for letting us know about the PR update.
I guess the update is only exported to toolbarqueries.google.com as the other datacentes (On which I was checking the Page Rank) are down at this moment.
May be there’s another update coming soon?
Thanks for your post.
I’m just wondering whether Google display the same search result for everyone (assuming that they are not logged into any Google accounts) ’cause I’ve done some searching on different comps (with different IPs of course) and the results page are slightly different too. So how likely is it for Google to display such results ?
I couldn’t be more confused. After this last PR update I’m seeing a drop in PR on sites that have held steady for a couple years at 3 or 4, seeing the ‘infamous’ gray bar with no PR on pages that at one time had a 3 or 4 PR. And absolutely no idea why. The only changes are some updates in info, added quality links (inbound). None of these sites use black hat techniques, they are just plain ol sites, optimized according to G’s rules, blah, blah, blah. Hard to know how to fix something when you don’t know the why’s.
Also, if we should just ignore PR then why does Google have it? While I don’t obsess over it, it seems like it must be an indicator of some sort or else it wouldn’t be available – so of course most of us watch it.
Hoping for some input on the drop in PR and the gray bars.
Thanks much!
I saw my web site and some of my customers get from PR 4 to PR 5, but I did not notice any differences for it’s number of visits… so… I think it confirms that the PR aren’t so important to search results as before… but I’m glad, because it shows that my effort are doing good…
Hi folk,
I have not seen any PR updates on my site though i have not worked for that also. lol
Update on my WordPress blog indexing problem: Turns out Godaddy.com hosting WordPress install defaulted the privacy option to “NOINDEX” all pages! Appears there is also an irregularity with 302 redirection from http://www to http:// thatI have not figured out yet.
When is the first 2009 update?
hopefully soon, but he aint gunna tell you here, probably because even he doesnt know.
@Matt.
Am I right in saying that the Google Toolbar PageRank tends to lag behind the true PageRank? May I also ask how frequently the PageRank is updated? I appreciate that this is an old post but it seemed the most relevant place to post.
Hi does anyone no if there will be a pagerank update in september 2009 ??
Yes it is expected that next PR update will occur in last week of September 2009 and hope that this PR update will bring good news to webmasters…..
September’s gone. Not sure whether there was any update. When is the next update expected?
When the whole world is moving towards transparency, why is Google so secretive about PR?
Today, when planning & scheduling have become the integral part of the smallest of business units, why is Google so erratic in updating PR?
Can’t the process be automated to update PR at a pre-determined schedule?
Can’t the process be made live like Alexa T(raffic)R?
Is it true that Google feels insecure regarding its authority if PR update goes live?
I’ve heard that PR gives very high weightage to incoming links. May be that’s the reason I frequently come across useless sites (often under construction) with high PR. Any plans to mend this?
Hurray! I just noticed, pagerank has been updated for October 2009.
Hi Yippi it looks like google have updated the pagerank well for most of my internal pages on my site. Hope its been good news for all you webmasters
Page rank seems to help some sites stay above others in the results. I have seen websites with very little of it and yet their on page SEO was good enough to keep them at the top of the results.
I just keep writing quality-optimized content and continue to publish pages, G seems to give me favor for doing that.