Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

If you are anything like me I notice any minor changes in my SEO efforts and this morning I did notice a slight change in some page ranks throughout some of the sites I work on.  I had not even had a change to read through my feeds but if I had I would have read one that came from Matt Cutts from Google the end of last week.

His latest post informed us of that Google had updated plans to update PageRank last week and this is the cause for the changes.  Before anyone panics this data refresh should have any effect on your rankings.  By the time we see the newer PR in the toolbar those values have already been incorporated in how we rank in the search results. 

Let me explain how Google calculates and updates PageRank.  Every 3-4 months they take a snapshot of PR values and export them so the new values are visible in the Google Toolbar.  They calculate PR by indexing data about your site such as backlinks, current PR and directory data.

So what happens if you are not happy with your current or new page rank? 

Then this is the time to start working on your PR for the next data refresh that will happen in a few months.

You can start by making sure your site is linked and added to industry related directories throughout the Internet. If you are not included on Yahoo!’s or Go Guides Directory that would be a good place to start.  You can also start working on building those incoming links.  Work on getting sites to link to you that have a PageRank of 4 or above and are authorative sites. 

One thing to remember…PageRank is not all what it is cracked up to be.  Even though I do check my PR’s every so often and do notice when they have changed I do not stress over the numbers.  I continually create high quality content that people naturally want to link to and if I keep my focus on that then PR will come as an extra bonus.

You can read Matt Cut’s post at: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-pagerank-update/

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