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In the past two days some PageRank changes have been reported. First Bryan at OneMansGoal reported a temporary gain in PageRank, and after that I’ve read about other changes. Might this be an indication that the PageRank export is finally happening?

If you did not know, PageRank - a ranking by Google - is exported to the Google Toolbar approximately every three months, or so. At least that’s how it has been for the last few years. Now, however, it has been well over four months since the last export, and many webmasters were wondering, if there will be a profound change to the whole thing (see the DigitalPoint thread on the topic for further discussion).

The other websites affected are John Chow’s blog, which went down from PageRank 6 to 5, and StatCounter - an excellent free counter by the way - which is still somewhere between PageRank 9 and 8. It used to be 9, but now some data centers are showing 8 for it.

If you want to check your website’s PageRank, I would not trust only the toolbar meter. Services like Smart PageRank allow you to check it from multiple data centers. If you see different values from different sources, that’s usually an indication of an update, or export happening.

I’m quite sure my blog will not get a PageRank yet in this update, since I moved to this domain less than a month ago. Nevertheless, I’m predicted at 4 already, and Google seems to be treating me nice on the result pages, so I’m not complaining. A value for the blog would be nice, but I actually think n/a looks better than 1-2 would.

Although I agree that PageRank is not important in itself, I don’t agree with those that “couldn’t care less” about it. It is still a part of Google’s ranking algorithm, and I don’t see that changing. It’s the invention that allowed Google to become the most popular search engine. If you keep in mind that the toolbar value is not the same as the one they use to rank sites, you can get a pretty good indication of a site’s worth by looking at its PR.

The next few days will tell whether this really is a PageRank export, or not.

by Sutocu | September 28, 2007