Late on Friday/early Saturday morning of last week (26th/27th October) Google systematically reassessed virtually every known or indexed website for Page Rank (PR). It wasn’t unexpected and they’d been rumours for a few weeks that the assessment would actually come between 1-10 November, so perhaps this was a deliberate attempt to catch us all on the back foot, so to speak.
This assessment was perhaps one of the most severe for many webmasters. Many sites lost their page rank entirely, and others took a fall. Of course, others benefited very nicely.
Sites which we’ve witnessed first hand doing very nicely seemed to have been sites which have ethically utilised the page redirect (301) rule in mass numbers…entirely ethical but nevertheless possibly an exploitation opportunity for others in future. Sites which didn’t fare quite so well were definately sites with poorer content and page copy. We’ve seen sites with good quality numbers of backlinks but poor page layout suffer. It seems that ecommerce sites somehow need to find a way of utilising content as well as their product range. Backlinks certainly still count, but seemingly now only when marred with good volumes of matching content.
Other surprises included the diversity of page data Google’s spiders are able to see and index. iframes don’t seem to deter the Google spiders as we’ve seen some good results of late in indexed content with sites using these, and we all know that Flash is no longer entirely invisable, and meta tagging certainly isn’t dead either!
Perhaps, Google’s new approach is to again re-establish some real value for their fledgling PR system. To be honest, sites with decent SERPs still have them post assessment regardless of the PR fluctuation, so what does PR really now mean? We’re guessing that Google have become cheesed off over the last year or two of link farmers and speculators who buy a cheap domain, point a few links to it and then ride off the back of the PR until the next assessment.
When Google undertake such a HUGE mass exercise of reassessing seemingly every site in such a short space of time, there are going to be casualties and there are going to be those who have tried to exploit the algorithms coming through with a result. But on the whole, we think Google are looking to recreate a level of integrity around PR and hence why a simple site with minimal value will no longer be able to have a decent PR quite as easily as it perhaps once could…
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(wb) Russ