Google PageRank and Backlink Update - Have You Been Affected?

After an unusually long time, it appears Google is updating its PageRank and Backlink measures according to many website owners.

Google’s PageRank and Backlink count are are key measures Google uses to determine its search engine rankings. While many skeptics believe PageRank is an irrelevant indicator, its hard to dismiss it when Google continues to promote as a pivotal measure of a site’s ranking potential - and Top Google rankings = Better website traffic.

The murmours started in the Digital Point forum over the weekend as site owners noticed changes in the PageRank and backlink figures displayed in the Google Webmaster Central. The two measures are available in the Crawl Stats and Links sections respectively.

At this stage there has been no formal announcement by Google about the update. Matt Cutts went so far as to say “I don’t expect a full PageRank update for at least a few more weeks, and possibly longer.” in one of his blog posts on the 30th Sept 2007.

If he was serious, then site owners will be wondering what is really going on. Perhaps there’s some minor adjustments being implemented prior to a serious update.

If you’re not versed on the PageRank measure, here’s the wikipedia definition:

“PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”

Whether you choose to follow the little green bar (PageRank measure) or not, the important thing to focus on is building up the number of relevant inbound links to your website. Your efforts in building up quality inbound links wont necessarily be displayed in the PageRank indicator immediately (its updated approx. every 3 months), however the benefits can be more felt sooner.

If you’ve noticed any changes to your backlink counts or PageRank, leave a comment and tell us how it’s impacted your website backlink “vitals”.

Well it has been well over the Historic 122 days that has passed which was the longest wait for a Google update and I think that people are starting to get a little upset! That little green meter has been an earmark for accomplishment in advertising in the Internet for quite some time now and people are now wondering now more than ever, Where Is That Export!!

It has been rumored in a thread at a very webmaster forum, Forums.Digitalpoint.com, that a member asked a question to Matt Cutts via the Matt Cutts Blog and Matt replied that it would not be for a few weeks yet but gave no reason why!

I think that if Google was going to take this long with the update that at least they would leak out a little press concerning this being that they have gained a lot of audience to their popularity system which in turn has several people to get their Due!

I welcome comments concerning this issue, or if you have any updated information for this, please visit the Google Update Thread at DevHunters.com

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