Google PR Update hits with a bang

Google finally decided to throw webmasters a bone and updated the toolbar pagerank. After six months without it, the masses were growing restless. But what does it all mean?

NOTHING!

That being said, I'm glad it's here because I rely on the toolbar pagerank as one of the criteria used with SEO clients. While SERPs are more important to me (and my clients), if the clients don't see increased pagerank, they start to wonder about my abilities.

Just thought I'd share some of the success stories in my SEO journey, which only began six months ago (about the time of the previous toolbar update).

• My primary web design site is now a pagerank of 5. I only started serious SEO on it in May, so that's pretty good. What's even better is that I'm ranking in the top ten for about 15 good keywords.
• I have over 20 clients with sites that have a pagerank of 4. All of them rank in the top ten for their primary keywords (some less competitive than others).
• Over 100 of my clients have sites with pageranks of 3. Nearly all of them rank in the top ten for their keywords (some are still works in progress).

Considering that I'm a self-taught SEO guy who only even heard about SEO about a year ago, and that I only seriously starting performing SEO for pay about 6 months ago, that's pretty good. Yeah, I'm braggin' a little.

I've even started my own SEO website for beginners. I'm sharing some of what I've learned for beginners on the site, and even though it's still in it's infancy, I would love for anyone who wants to contribute articles to the site to do so. You can contact me through the site itself.

Google backlink update took place last night

When I logged into my webmaster tools this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my backlinks had been updated. Some of my sites are getting serious upticks in their backlink count, which as we all know is an indication of potential pagerank which leads to higher SERPs (with the proper SEO of course).

Google is becoming far better at updating the backlinks on a regular basis and keeping them fresh. Webmasters monitoring their sites' progress need timely information, and at one time, Google was only providing monthly backlink updates, and much of the information was already dated by the time it actually reached the tool. I still see some links that no longer exist listed in the webmaster tools, but the results are promising. Between this backlink update and the last update, a lot of dead backlinks have been removed, and some of my good backlinks are showing up.

The question still remains though: why are NOFOLLOW links being shown in the webmaster tools?

I'm predicting a large Google algorithm change this weekend or next

I created a little tool for myself that helps me track keywords that I'm optimizing on, and the websites associated with those optimization campaigns. This is a tool used offline, and I have to enter data into it manually. It works well when gauging the progress of some of my optimization campaigns. I wrote it myself using Visual Basic 6, and it has some nifty features.

One thing I use it for is to track keywords that I no longer perform optimization for. The SERPs for these keywords are fairly stable, moving up and down through the various Google dance steps. In general, they trend down, simply because I no longer focus on them. I can generally tell when Google is testing an algo tweak because these keywords bounce around in the SERPs then settle back to roughly their same previous positions.

I created a formula based on these keywords (there are about 100 of them) that shows the variance in SERPs over time. The formula produces a number that gives me a basic idea of the current volatility of the Google search results. The number can be anywhere between -100 and 100, with zero being absolutely no change from the previous week (I normally manually add the updated SERP data once per week, but the formula will work equally well on a daily, hourly, monthly, or yearly basis. The shorter the time period, however, the more pronounced are any small changes.)

Normally, the variance figure is between 5-10 (or -5 and -10), which means a variance of 5-10. (*Note-I'm not a math whiz, so if my terminology is incorrect, you know where you can take yourself). During some of the obvious algo tweaks, the variance goes as high as 15 or 20, but usually drops after one week. Since the formula uses about 100 keywords, a severe change for one keyword doesn't alter the end result as severely as it would were I only to use 5 or 6 keywords. When the variance hits 15 or 20, that means that I've had some fairly significant change in SERPs for my keywords. The change may be up or down because the direction of the SERP change isn't as important to me as the actual amount of increase or decrease.

Two weeks ago, I started entering SERP values in as often as possible (often once per day). I've been paying close attention to the variance looking for signs that Google is doing algo testing. Twice in the last two weeks, I've seen major SERP changes that showed variances of up to 35. Even factoring in the changes introduced by doing it nearly daily, that shows at least a minor algo change has taken place. My opinion is that those were instances of Google nerds testing algo changes in preparation for a larger algorithm change.

I may just be reading the tea leaves incorrectly, but I'm expecting the algorithm changes that have been tested over the last month or so to be implemented either this weekend or next. If it doesn't happen this weekend, and next week is fairly quiet regarding SERP movements, watch out - we may be in for a major algorithm change.

(For those who are going to ask the obvious question: no I don't see a toolbar PR update happening for quite a while still.)

No Google toolbar pagerank update for a couple of weeks (via Matt Cutts)

Just read an interesting tidbit written by Matt Cutts over at the Digital Point forum. His post can be found here. You can read the post, but the interesting part is quoted here:

"As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn't expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess."

The post in which Mr. Cutts posted the comment is here.

So, I'm guessing that we're looking at late October or early November, just in time for the holiday season. It's just my opinion, though.

New major algo changes coming from Google?

Watching the hand-wringing over the next PR update, and the record amount of time that Google has waited to make this update makes me wonder how large the algorithm change will be in this update. Some clues:

• Many websites are being dropped from the index, only to reappear several days later. This indicates that the Google engineers are testing a new piece of the algorithm to see how it affects certain websites.
• Matt Cutts' indications that the Big 'G will be cracking down on paid links - it's almost certain that a large algo change will be implemented in an attempt to curtail the power of compensated links.
• The simple length of time between this update and the last update, showing that they are doing some substantial testing before deploying the new updates.
• Huge SERP movements up and down - I've seen this on a number of my sites that have had stable SERP rankings over the last year.
• The rapidity of backlink updates in the webmaster tools. I know that this is an ongoing thing, but I've had 3 major BL updates since the beginning of August.
• The "directory penalty". This isn't something that's been advertised, but I believe that Google will, if not completely penalize, at least downgrade links from directories so that they have less power. In my webmaster tools, I show very few links from directories, whereas I had thousands of them as late as June.
  
• More of a focus on "authority site" links that are naturally positioned. Again, this is a fight against paid links. (although I have seen an increasing # of authority sites selling text links in the last few weeks)

Each of these taken one by one don't indicate anything different from Google's normal practice of incremental changes and algo updates. Taken all together, they show indications of a MAJOR algo change.

Webmasters get ready - the next few months could be a headache if you're not ready.