PR Update? The SEO Community Is Expecting

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

SEOs all over the Internet are jittery with anticipation. Everyone is expecting a PageRank update soon. Why?

(Source) As of August 21st, there has not been a PR update for 1049 days.

Historically, Google doesn’t go this long without updating its PR visibility. What I mean by that is the updates are continuous. You can read Matt Cutts’ post on that topic here. What gets the SEO community excited is when Google decides to make its updates public – which is not continuous. To make the data public requires an export from Google’s crawler technologies into its reporting infrastructure.

When this happens we usually see rises and falls in PR among our websites so that’s what everyone is waiting for. We’re looking to see when Google performs its data export so that we can see where we stand. Meanwhile, I found an interesting website that reports all of the PR10 websites on the web. This could be useful information.

Observations From Behind the PR Cloud

I notice some interesting items when I look at this page. First, Google stores only has 58 back links, but it’s a PR10. How does that happen? The second thing I notice is that Blogger, Yahoo, and MSN all dropped to PR9 when Google performed its last update. I wouldn’t be too concerned about this. PRs typically move up and down over the life of a website, but as PRs for a particular website climb higher such fluctuations should happen less often.

Blogger’s fall from PR10 is understandable. It’s possible that Google dropping a lot of spam sites from Blogger.com had an effect on its overall PR and maybe that’s why it fell to a PR9. Until Google figures out a way to control the splogs that will likely continue to happen.

MSN has been having issues this past year. No longer reporting its back links due to some data mining issues, MSN has lost some back links, probably from SEO sites like MarketLeap that report all the search engines’ link popularity. Until MSN corrects that problem it will likely stay at a PR9.

Yahoo is the one I don’t understand. While Google back links for ERCIM and energy.gov fell and Yahoo’s stayed the same, the two former sites remained at a PR10 while Yahoo fell to a PR9. I’m not sure why that would be the case. If anyone has any insight into that, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

One thing does remain clear, however. We are due an update soon. Your SEO may not be telling you, but he is getting antsy. I am too.