At first, there were some hints of a new pagerank update. Some sites were showing a green bar where none had been before: I personally noticed this on one of my newest bookmarking sites and also on a new category at one of my more established blogs…
Then things got crazy.
- I switched to another blog, my personal blog: A big grey N/A.
- I went to one of my big money-makers: A big grey N/A.
- My favorite bookmarking sites? All N/A.
One of two things is happening:
Either Google took a massive hatchet to the majority of sites that allow users to share links, or about half of their PR centers are offline. (I sincerely hope it is the latter)
We know Google doesn’t like self-promotion for the sake of building links, pagerank, and search ranking – but are they going to go so far as to cut off established blogging platforms and top-tier social bookmarking websites.
It will probably be another few days or a week before we know exactly which scenario it is, and neither one would really be a surprise to me at this point. However, I have decided that I’m going to distract myself with writing new articles since it is a relatively useless time to research locations of backlink sources.
In the next week, we’ll probably have the first big hint of Vince’s effect on the hierarchy of the web.
Is the social apocolypse many have long feared? Is it another generic PR update that simply shows us an outdated average of back link value? Time will tell, and right now there’s little we can do but speculate.
Its about time! PageRank has been due for an update IMO.
I myself have not seen any PageRank changes though they are due. I saw minor search ranking changes for phrases but nothing drastic.
I have confirmed through multiple sources that a toolbar PR update happened this weekend. So far, a couple of my sites have increased by 1 and the rest have stayed the same. I haven’t been focusing on PR that much lately, though. My main concerns has been SERPs, which have been doing really well of late.