Google Says “Jump”… are you still asking how high?
So, its time for our obligatory google dance again. The
latest update to the TBPR ranks has been going on for the last few days, and while most sites seem to have completed their move one wonders if it will be another “double whammy” update like we had in November. (for the short of memory folks there were two updates in a week, the first being affectionately known as the google slap…..)
Like most other professional webmasters I followed it with some interest, after all it does govern how much links will be worth/are going to cost for the next 3 months, so even if you place no credence in the toolbar PR then it still affects you, directly or indirectly as links are the only true currency of the webmaster these days.
What happened to my sites? Well, surprisingly little.
Sites that have stagnated have remained PR3/PR4, sites that have gained links (and in one case from 3,000 to 40,000 links) have not changed. Sites that have lost links have also not changed.
Infact, out of 130+ active sites on my books at the moment, the only changes I saw were a handful of PRn/a changing to PR Zero. All that linkbuilding, seo work, and assorted efforts, and not a single change to my sites? There is something whiffy afoot.
It has been said for some time now that google are working on ways of removing themselves from this link economy, which to be fair they created by valuing off site seo practices at about 95% of a websites overall strength. So whats happening? Well, a lot of playing about needs to be done to get a true picture as to what is going on but a fair guess would be that the algorithm’s that google use to calculate what constitutes a link has changed significantly. Also one wonders whether they have started weighting some links higher than others based on age, total page yield per site/IP, total content per site, and so on. Some of my bigger sites with tens of thousands of pages indexed have noticeably increased in the SERPs over the last week, whereas some very noticeable smaller sites have slipped. Perhaps its a sign of things to come, perhaps on the other hand we are just going to get another index update later in the week. Hopefully it will be another big fat google slap that will upset all the other link buying webmasters!!
Anyway, Im off to enjoy my nice cool calimocho,
MM