Google PageRank Update September 2010 – Where art thou?

Has it changed yet? This is one of the most common questions which webmasters across the globe have been asking about their own and their competitor’s Google PageRank. Why this question? Simple, Google hasn’t updated its Public PageRank for quite some time putting the entire PageRank economy in a spot. The last confirmed update was in April 2010. That’s five months of agonizing wait. Most people online had expected the lull to end with a Google PageRank Update in September 2010.

For newcomers Google page rank is a scale of 1 to 10 used by Google to judge the quality of your webpage. Pages that the Google PR algorithm deems worthy receive a higher page rank and are more likely to appear higher in the SERPS. The number and quality of inbound and outbound links to the site is the primary driver used by Google to establish a sites PR. Google on its corporate site describes PageRank as

“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

Google PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

What is known for a fact about the Google PageRank process is that there are two different PRs that Google calculates.

• Public PageRank that is detected by the google toolbar and is updated more or less every 3 months or so.
• Real PageRank – The secretive PageRank which is updated more frequently by google in order to improve relevancy of its search results.

The Pagerank algorithm uses the network of network of links between web pages to determine their value and judges a page to be important if it is linked to by other important pages.  Since real PR is updated more frequently this requires an iterative ranking algorithm which will check all the linkages and the juice flowing thru these links over smaller intervals of time. This would logically mean that Google must have already updated the real PageRanks on its servers. So why isn’t it showing it on the tool bar?

Perhaps Google wants to bring down the multi-million dollar link selling and exchange economy. The only thing I can say to all the web masters asking “Google PageRank Update September 2010; where r thou?” is Hold on, keep your fingers crossed, perhaps tomorrow may be the day when the Public PR will finally be revealed.

~ Online Marketing  Department