A new Google pagerank update happened and the Google toolbar is reflecting pagerank change information for millions of websites. If you recall Google has not been refreshing pagerank for over 10 months now and several SEO experts thought that pagerank would be discontinued altogether.
Google PageRank Update!
Google pagerank has been an important indicator for website importance in eyes of Google and top sites often get a PR9 or PR10 ranking. SEO firms often try to buy backlinks and try tactics to game pagerank to showcase higher pagerank for their clients. But with so many Google penalties being pushed across last 2 years, Google failed to refresh the pagerank data, encouraging webmasters to concentrate more on make sites better, rather than try to get better pagerank by blackhat SEO.
Remember how Google used to penalize websites engaged in buying /selling links by reducing pageranks. Still several toxic link detection tools evaluate parameters to find PR0 or PR grayed out websites, which could be bad neighborhoods to link to.
Google did push a PR update – Matt Cutts confirms this PR update and says that a PR push was done while fixing a backend service that handles ‘dupes and equivalent names’, and pagerank still continues to be less of a priority for Google.
So what happened to our pagerank? Well it seems to be still stable at PR5 , though we removed 1.7 million backlinks!
How to check your toolbar pagerank? You can download the Google toobar on IE, or grab PR Checker Chrome extensions and check pagerank of any page.
Has your pagerank changed?