Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Toolbar Pagerank Update Delays

Three months passed and still no PR update. However, in the last 2 weeks, there are changes on the future pagerank, which was very static before. Maybe Google do the PR updates more rarely now because they want to let new sites with PR0 longer. Or they hope webmasters involved in linking spam will eventually give up if they see no results in PR.
Or they just hope link selling/buying will stop if the period of PR update grows.

One thing is sure, we see changes in future PR since about 2 weeks now, so the PR should update within one month. At least this is my prediction. I constantly watched these future PRs, which are actually not very accurate, but they were not updating for a long period until two weeks ago.

Many are talking that pagerank is no longer important. Statistically probably it is still very important since only a few percent of webmasters are doing search engine optimization. Excepting the webmasters which are really obsessed by the Page Rank and every day they submit to directories and do link exchanges to increase the "green", for the rest of the sites, which should be 90% or more, PR is still very relevant.

Basically a search engine should look first for content, then for site popularity, which is how many backlinks the site has, how many visitors, etc.

Since PR is so public and popular now, Google definitely has some other rank, which they keep secretly. Some are talking about a trust rank(how old is your site, how clean, etc).

So now the SERPs are sorted by these 3 factors:

1) content
2) trust rank
3) page rank

Why I think content is first? If you dont have a page about "wild animals" you will not appear on any "wild animals" search.

Trust rank? If your domain is new or you are involved in link schemes or you hide content, do redirections then it is most likely your trust is low so you go down in PR

And about PR, there are rare cases where a page without any backlink appear on SERP, however even if it does, it will never be on top for a competitive keyword.

The key to a succesful website considering the three factors?
1) Build quality content useful for your visitors
2) Don't involve in link exchanges and respect http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
3) Get some backlinks, but do it naturally and only from quality related websites

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