Matt Cutts mentioned a few days ago that we could see a PageRank update as early as this weekend and it is underway. As usual, the update is a snapshot from about three weeks earlier, and this update falls right in line with that time frame.

I’m not seeing any huge changes, but it seems clear that Google did “expand” their requirements for each level as many large, popular sites, such as Webmaster World, dropped a point in PageRank.

For my sites, there was very little movement on the home pages, the movement which was significant was on the internal pages, which is right where you want it. While many have claimed in forums to being “grey barred” with their internal pages, I’m not seeing it.

I’ve been saying for years to stop the “Green Bar Addiction” as PageRank really isn’t a metric that is a good indicator of your site’s health in your market. What matters is traffic and conversion. I agree with Leslie Rohde when he calls PageRank “For Entertainment Purposes Only”.

In short, don’t put much weight on PageRank. Even Matt Cutts clarified the issue:

Even if you don’t show much PageRank, Google still has 200+ other signals we use in our ranking. It’s definitely common to see lower-PageRank sites ranking above higher-PageRank sites–which tends confuses the people who obsess too much about PageRank and who don’t focus on other factors that search engines might use to rank pages.

It has been rumored that this update is an all-out attack on paid links. Not true according to my data. If your PageRank went down, no need to panic, as it is not a key factor in how Google ranks pages. Webmasters who panic often make poor decisions. Concentrate on traffic and conversions. That’s what puts food on the table.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Google, SEM/SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.