PageRank Happenings

Google PageRank - not such smiley faces anymore.

After months of nothingness on the PageRank front it now appears that Google engineers are beginning to flick switches in their network of Data Centers. It seems like bad news for a lot of webmasters including me, with vast drops in PR across the web. It looks like AdSense4Dummies and YouTube Karaoke, my two most popular blogs, could drop from their current PR4 to only PR2. This is despite considerable effort to promote them and build their backlinks and traffic.

I'm hoping it's just a temporary pre-update rollback, although I'm doubtful of this because these 2 blogs have never been PR2 in the past. Maybe Google, increasingly (and arrogantly) filling the role of web God, has just taken a dislike to my sites for including the words 'AdSense' and 'YouTube' respectively?

There has been a few major upsets PR wise over recent weeks. StatCounter, a webstats service which was previously a PR10, dropped to PR9 at the last update (end of April) and more recently to only PR8. Darren Rowse's ProBlogger, previously a solid PR7, now has the very mediocre rank of PR4. V7N forums, previously a strong PR6 webmaster community, is now only a PR5.

From these and the many other dramatic decreases in PageRank it is becoming more apparent that the sheer volume and quality of backlinks, the previous sole determining factor, is becoming a less significant commodity. Google is getting personal.

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