For the past weeks, months even on every blog I read or stumble upon there was a post regarding the latest Google PageRank update and it’s really begun to be annoying. Webmasters and bloggers alike have begun to obsess over PR, checking their backlinks frequently and engaging in never ending PR update forum threads.

I believe PageRank is extremely irrelevant and overrated, as it does little to pinpoint the authority or credibility of a blog (it’s main purpose). Some of you may say that PageRank is a important SEO variable, that Google uses, alongside many other factors and algorithms, to rank and arbitrate websites. Couldn’t agree more, but that’s what the internal PageRank is for, displaying the external PR value does more harm then good. It’s actually maybe the most important factor people use when buying links (illegal), there are thousands of spam website and blogs built to abuse the PR system, damaging the productive and serious websites rankings. My advice to Google? Scrap it, seriously.

Anyway, enough with the silly talk, so I’ll just cut to the matter at hand: Google PR is close, real close. I’ve avoided talking about it, because I simply hate it (guess you’ve realized that by now) so I’m gonna try to be as objective and non aberrant as possible when saying I truly believe PR will happen soon, 2 weeks tops.

It all started in August, when a small fraction of webmasters reported that their Google toolbar had been showing different values for their websites PR. More and more webmasters signaled the same issues throug out the months of August and September, while at the beginning of October some serious PR fluctuations and more importantly a massive backlink update occurred. Yesterday a lot of people reported that  their directories and more or less dubious websites experienced PR changes, almost all of them had a -1 rank change. This is clearly Google penalizing websites that sell links and abuse the system and this happens as massively, as it did yesterday, just before the big visual PR update. Search Engine Journal and Matt Cutts further emphasize the idea.

Google is still probably hard at work finding spam blogs and banning them, that’s prolly why it’s been delayed so much in the first place, but the important thing is that it’ll be here and fast.

Any PR changes at your side?

If you enjoyed this post, then you might consider subscribing to our feed via RSS or e-mail. Find out more about subscribing here. Thanks for visiting!

The External Google PageRank update: soon enough? by Tibi Puiu, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.