International Search Engine Marketing Blog

Many people will check their websites’ Page Ranks (correctly written as the trademarked one word: PageRank) this Monday morning and see the first update in nearly half a year. Keep in mind that this will have little impact on any website’s search rankings, whether the site is an international one or based in the United States. However, the number does serve as Barometer that measures that value of external links pointing to a website and educated website owners should have concern if their site’s PageRank drops. That is why this morning; many people will smile, while others will frown.

The fact of the matter is that PageRank (PR) is updated on a continual basis. However, Google has increasingly lengthened the amount of time between updating the PR displayed on their toolbar. The basic reason is that Google derives little benefit from updating the PR shown to the public.

SEO and SEM firms find this number quite valuable as it is one piece of information they can use when attempting to increase a site’s rankings within the search results. All else equal a link from a page with a higher PR is worth more than a link from a page with a lower PageRank. The fastest and easiest way to determine a page’s value is to look at the PR displayed by Google’s toolbar.

Since Google does not like anyone influencing their search results and most certainly does not want to make it easier for someone to do so, I hypothesis that is the primary reason why Google updates the PR displayed on their toolbar less and less frequently.

Keep in mind, the toolbar PR number is simply the one displayed and not the value used by Google on a daily basis. That said, why do such a large number of people care about this all illusive number? One reason is that people do not realize that the PR number is not updated in real time and simply associate the value of a website by the number Google displays on their toolbar.

The other reason site owner’s place such a high importance on PageRank is that a website with a higher PR is viewed as more valuable to other webmaster’s and search engine optimization experts. Often, SEO experts are willing to work harder to obtain a link from a higher PR site than one with a lower ranking and as a result there is a symbiotic monetary value associated with a site’s PageRank.

Those who are in the business of obtaining SEO friendly links are those most impacted by this recent update. As mentioned previously, many people will smile, while other will frown. Those smiling will obviously be the owner’s of website’s that have a higher PageRank since a large portion of the web community will consider their site more valuable. The converse is true for those site owners who now have a lower PR.

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