There was a flutter of excitement mixed with dread in the world of search today as a new Google PageRank update took place. As these updates seem to occur every three months, with the last one occurring in February, anticipation has been growing over the past few weeks as another update approached.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with SEO-speak, ‘PageRank’ is a system Google uses to rate websites based on their authority. It all comes down to links, meaning that if a website has a lot of other websites linking to it, it’s likely to have a higher PageRank than a website with no links. Google also takes into account the authority of the linking websites too. So one link from an established, well-known website, can be a lot more valuable than several links from smaller, new websites.
While many people view PageRank as extremely important; a high PageRank is basically like getting a big ‘thumbs up’ from Google, there are just as many who argue that it bears little to no value in terms of actual SEO. Either way, there will be plenty of people rushing to check their toolbar of choice to see just how this latest update has affected the PR of their site; if you’re one of those people, good luck!
