Google is Updating its Page Rank Again

It looks like we are going through another PageRank update. I’ve seen some blogs and websites move up in PR just in the last couple of days. SEOJ is now a PageRank 5 - woo hoo!

Well, just a little bit of info for you on PageRank, if you are not all that familiar. Having a PR4 really is not anything super duper to be proud of. If you do everything right in the SEO department, you can reach a PageRank of 4 within 1 year, no problems. You really don’t start getting the recognition you deserve until you hit PageRank 5 and beyond. But for every step in PR you take up the ladder, the more difficult it becomes to get to the next one. I think there are two reasons for that.

No. 1, it gets more competitive as you move higher up in PageRank. But, you also have to do more to convince the search engines that you are a trustworthy source. You don’t really have to work harder. What I mean is, once you’ve got thousands of inbound links from authority sources, getting more of them is a little more difficult to come by. You really have to be a trustworthy authority; you can’t fake it. Faking it in the lower ranks is easier, in other words.

But keep in mind that whatever your PageRank is today is not your real PageRank. Google updates its PR about three to four months behind when it actually goes up. So it isn’t real time. Since SEOJ went up to PR5 just in the last couple of days, that means we were at a PR5 three months ago. Assuming that we are still on the incline with our PageRank, I’m likely between a PageRank 5 and PageRank 6 - something like a PR 5.4.

Google PageRank is ever evolving. It goes up and down on a daily basis depending on what you are doing on your website. If you get plugged with negative algorithmic karma then your PR will go down. If you do the good stuff then it goes up, but you’ll never see it in real time.

Many SEOs don’t put a lot of stock in it any more. I still think there is some value in PageRank, but it isn’t what it used to be. It is a good measure to watch to determine if you are doing all the right things and making the search engines happy. If you see your PR go down, look back over the last three months to see what you might have done to influence that.