Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Google Updates PageRank Just in Time for The Holiday Season!

Christmas has come early for web site owners desperately holding out to find out if PageRank would ever update again this year. Twitter is abuzz with webmasters who noticed PageRank was updated last December 6 early in the morning, for the first time since February 2013. It’s unexpected to a lot of people who have been waiting for this to happen again, considering that Matt Cutts had already stated that there were no plans for one more 2013 PageRank update because of technical problems.

According to Cutts at Pubcon Las Vegas in October they hadn’t noticed a new PageRank update mainly because the pipeline that pushes PageRank information from the internal Google servers to the toolbar broke. Certainly, there were no plans to fix it, he said, at least not for the remainder of the year. On the other hand, it seems that they made a decision getting this details out to the community was useful enough that they fixed the dilemma.

It looks like that most of the sites that are new since the February update are starting out with PR1 or PR2. On the other hand, websites that have currently had PageRank in the neighborhood of PR4-PR6 didn’t get much in the way of PR updates and enhancement this time.

“We looked at hundreds of sites and 90 percent dropped,” reveals Dave Naylor of Bronco. “We’ve not seen a lot gaining PageRank in big leaps this time. We saw PR6s drop to PR1s, but not many PR1s rise to a PR6.” Right now there is also a lot of rumor that this information is old, not that fresh, and that the data appears to be to be several months old. 

Seeing that Google obtains day-to-day updates to their internal PageRank tool, it may seem a bit strange that Google would certainly push out decayed data except for when there is a purpose for it.

“My gut feeling is that the PageRank is from when the Google PageRank system broke, so it’s not new PageRank; it’s second hand PageRank from September-ish,” says Naylor.

Owning a Google Page Rank update executed in the few weeks leading up to Christmas (specially as it’s their very first update since February) is also a bit unusual. With updated PageRank during a very busy shopping time of year, it could certainly have an impact on those who have bought links from high PR sites if those sites have seen a drop in PR.

It is also necessary to remember that Google sees their PageRank update internally on a regular basis, and that is what affects the algorithm, not the PageRank that is openly spotted by individuals through the Google toolbar or some other similar tool. However, the idea of quality of the site, specifically when it comes to acquiring links or ads, still obtains a lot of its weight from the existing site’s PageRank in figuring out its worth, even when that information is several months old.