Upcoming Pagerank Update

page rank update 2007

[fritzbayer]

Hi,

the last pagerank update was in april. We have been waiting for the upcoming one for a couple of month now.

I'm wondering why matt cutts hasn't mentioned anything about why this one is taking so long?

Also I was wondering whether or not people can make a smart guesses on when we should expect it to be (november, december, 2008 ...)?

Fritz

[kidder]

toolbar update --- google is serving up brain damage to the link sellers and buyers , my guess is that this delay is very much on purpose. Maybe this is the end of little green bar as we have come to know it.

[RichTC]

without the green bar, webmasters have no reason to install the google tool bar and may install other search engines bars instead?

Without updating the bar, webmasters will eventually drop the tool bar all together if its of no use.

So as i see it google have to make the call - do they want to keep it or dump it? If they want to keep it then i think its time it was improved or at least updated.

As for a time scale - based on previous years i would Guess a November Green bar update but its anyones guess.

[Crush]

It is a nice gimmick. Shame they do not update it. I think it is against link sellers etc but why not let them make some money eh? Google makes enough an has spread a whole cottage industry by having the bar. So either do it or drop it.

[RichTC]

Have to agree with you crush

I dont get involved in selling links myself but i just dont see any difference between text link sales and another type of advert on a site.

At the end of the day if advertisers want to pay you to advertise why should it matter if its text only adverts, anchor text adverts, graphic only, text and graphic etc etc - Advertising is advertising.

As i see it normally a high page rank is associated with being more popular and having more sites linking to it. In principle the higher the page rank the more desirable the site should be to an advertiser as the ad is "more likely" to be seen by more visitors?.

I think google should either drop the green bar or make it worth downloading - currently its out of date and next to useless and it sounds like from what we have seen that too much focus is on bashing sites selling link advertising when we are also led to belive that the algo takes into account millions of other factors other than links.

If it is the selling of text links that google doesnt like then perhaps they should stop all adwords customers that are buying links on google advertising "text links for sale" to STOP advertising!
Currently over 40 different sites are bidding on the words "Text Links for Sale" what message is that giving out?.

Its getting rather silly if you ask me. By now the algo should be able to factor in absolutely everything.

Time will tell anyway but the logical way forward i would have thought would be to decide what to do and if they stick with it, update it on a regular basis and factor into the algo that a percentage of sites may be selling / buying links

[edited by: RichTC at 12:59 pm (utc) on Oct. 11, 2007]

[glitterball]

They should update it or drop it.

An unfortunate side-effect of having no PR update is that many webmasters have got it into their heads that it is bad to link to sites with low or no PR. Therefore this delay is only confounding the problems with getting new sites to rank in google.

[Alex70]

"i just dont see any difference between text link sales and another type of advert on a site." buying link's for PR purpose and improving ranking is not advertising. Most of those wesite selling links are invisible to people and you wouldn't spend your money on it for advertising if G wasn't here.

[jimbeetle]

I'm wondering why matt cutts hasn't mentioned anything about why this one is taking so long?

He has. From an Oct. 1st comment on his blog, " I don’t expect a full PageRank update for at least a few more weeks, and possibly longer."

So, figure it for sometime in the next whenever or whatever.

[netmeg]

without the green bar, webmasters have no reason to install the google tool bar and may install other search engines bars instead?

I expect the webmasters who download the toolbar for the green bar are a pretty small percentage of overall toolbar users (or desired toolbar users); I'd be surprised if Google gave this consideration much thought.

[akshay]

i have noticed changes in my sites page ranks for october 2007.

thanks
aks

[edited by: tedster at 2:24 pm (utc) on Oct. 11, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[WiseWebDude]

I haven't seen any changes in a long time now...still see none on ANY site. Surely they will roll one out soon and maybe this is it.

[fritzbayer]

@RichTC
@Crush

I agree with what you have said.

[Simsi]

without the green bar, webmasters have no reason to install the google tool bar and may install other search engines bars instead?

Funny you say that - I just installed IE7 and have left the MSN bar there as PR was the only "extra" I ever used the Google TB for. Well, Autofill was quite nice but it's not worth the install.

[CainIV]

"An unfortunate side-effect of having no PR update is that many webmasters have got it into their heads that it is bad to link to sites with low or no PR."

Anyone worth getting a link from won't care what your pagerank is, at least this has been my experience. They link to you because you offer something special, regardless of content.

The people who will link to you only based on pagerank are doing it exclusively for rankings and passing pagerank, and I am quite Google doesn't care about whether the are satisfied or not.

[ecmedia]

I think eliminating the toolbar rank is the best way for G to fight link sellers and buyers and I wouldn't be surprised if G never updated its pagerank. To dozens of my friends and family members, a pagerank is meaningless even though they have the toolbar installed (most cases it was preinstalled or got installed with a software that they downloaded from Google). All these people want is answer to their question. They don't consider if a page is good because the PR is high.

[liborson]

Hi,
so far I remember there was April TB update - somehow messed up. And then there was a new one at the end of July - basically fixing the April mess up.... some our websites got the new green bar by then. So, if Google keeps 3-4x yearly update frequency, the new expected one could be around November.

As for displaying toolbar - I do not know. For fighting link brokers - OK, lets not display it. For new webmasters, working hard on their websites, comparing with the others, hungry calling for getting some respect from Da Engine - why not to display? :)

BTW, if it has no more than entertaining value for the webmasters, the toolbar itself is very valuable for google itself, as it gives them users browsing data, patterns, behaving... so I guess they will keep it as it is.

[martinibuster]

So, figure it for sometime in the next whenever or whatever.

Haha, good one Jim. :)

I think the progressive webmaster is going to use the lack of a toolbar update to cherry pick good link opportunities overlooked by those obsessed by the green bar. Go to town.

[nomis5]

My take on this is that Matt C has said there will be an update sometime. We also know the update has taken longer than normal. That leave two probabilities. First, the update will be much more than a standard update, possibly new functionality is to be introduced. The other likleyhood is that more important tasks are sapping resources from a PR update.

My guess is the former. The PR bar is popular, they won't drop it, rather they will enhance what it offers.

[lgn1]

Its been 164 days since the last Toolbar PR update. Maybe they are doing it only twice a year now. In which case I would expect an update in two to three weeks, any longer than this, then all bets are off.

[rocco]

"i just dont see any difference between text link sales and another type of advert on a site." buying link's for PR purpose and improving ranking is not advertising. Most of those wesite selling links are invisible to people and you wouldn't spend your money on it for advertising if G wasn't here.

It is interesting to read some early papers about backrub/google and to find out that links = votes = the probability a user will visit a page from links on other pages. Keep that in mind, the original pagerank actually wants to weight pages based on the probability of visits. High pagerank pages without visitors - at least in some sense - are holding non-legit pagerank.

[Komodo_Tale]

Don't forget that Matt Cutts said, last year, that Big Daddy was designed to enable Google to make changes to improve their rankings. I have a feeling that Google put visible PageRank updates on low priority because they are busy creating and testing algorithm updates. The attack on paid links. The squeezing of reciprocal links. The devaluation of low-grade directories. These appear to all be pieces in the puzzle.

Also, when Google updated PageRank after BigDaddy there seemed to be a lot of stuttering before the final roll out. It was as if they had to rewrite and test the program because the old PageRank update program no longer operated. What is happening now feels reminiscent. If they are manually devaluing PageRank on some domains then they may be rewriting and testing the roll out program to include new factors.

Does this sound plausible?

[edited by: Komodo_Tale at 6:00 am (utc) on Oct. 12, 2007]

[soapystar]

are you saying they devalue pr before the fact?..how would this be possible?...surely any penalty is after pr is calculated...if pr is dependent on everyone else's pr how can you write a program to isolate certain sites for devaluation?..it would affect everyone else...you would have to do it as a layer like any other filter after the fact..now if you are saying the the new software would be to remove low end pages/sites and handle supplementals in a specific way in continuing iterations thus calculating pr in a way different than before i think i can see the sense in what your saying...but then again..who knows! :)

[vincevincevince]

It's interesting to note that Toolbar PageRank^tm can now be treated as a weapon by Google against webmasters. Even if a measure would be far too crude to be actually implemented, it could be used just to change Toolbar PageRank^tm to scare webmasters away from undesired behaviour and prompt them to self-correct.

[soapystar]

well its not could be..they have been doing that since the start..with the old white pr for some penalties....

[RichTC]

Hi Cain,

Anyone worth getting a link from won't care what your pagerank is, at least this has been my experience. They link to you because you offer something special, regardless of content.

Agree to a certain point.

However, In my case looking at it from the other side, when im faced with looking for associated content for a site that i think might be useful to users, i dont want to have loads of outbound links and like many webmasters im very, very selective.

If i have two resources that i think could be useful and only want one to feature in a specific subject i will always select the one with the higher Page Rank over the other - thats just the way it is.

High PR pages tend to prefer to link to High PR pages in my experience and the green bar is used for this.

[blend27]

I am GTA member for at least 12 month, after a short week of "rehab" upstate New York where everything IS in different colors this time of the year.

[CainIV]

If i have two resources that i think could be useful and only want one to feature in a specific subject i will always select the one with the higher Page Rank over the other - thats just the way it is.

Just another reason why the toolbar is not helpful, because anyone can 'get' pagerank.

[Atomic]

If I was Google and I could determine who was selling links based on PR, I would keep their PR the same but reduce their TBPR. Wouldn't that be fun.

< Admin Note: The discussion continues here:
Google Page Rank Updated [webmasterworld.com] >

[edited by: tedster at 2:42 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2007]