Well there has been another pagerank update for this year and this time on April 1… yes April Fools Day!
I’ve only just noticed it today as one of my sites – yes this one – lost it’s pagerank completely. Not that there was much of a pagerank on here anyway at just 2 but still a pagerank is better than no pagerank at all.
I know that you get those out there who go on about how pagerank is overrated and you shouldn’t pay any attention to it and I agree to a point. Pagerank is definitely not what it used to be but really it’s all we’ve got. Well maybe it’s not the only thing but it is a quick and easy way to gauge the value of a website. It may not be perfect but it does the job.
I don’t actively promote this site in a big way – in fact, I hardly do anything with it at all except write blog posts. I really put most of my efforts into my product niche sites so I can’t expect to get much of a pagerank.
So although my pagerank has disappeared from this site and it is a bit disappointing I haven’t actually noticed any change in traffic.
But I have my theories about why the pagerank disappeared. I use a Recent Comments plugin. This displays visitors who leave the most comments and includes a link to their website. This encourages people to leave a comment. My theory is that some of these sites may be considered ‘bad neighbourhood’ type sites and Google doesn’t like it when you link to spammy type websites. I am going to remove that plugin and see if it makes a difference for the next Google pagerank update.
As for my other websites, one of them as gone from a pagerank 3 to a 4 and the rest have remained static. Interestingly, that site that has gone to a pagerank 4 has one page on it that has a pagerank of 5. It is not the homepage as would be expected but an internal page. It was just an article I uploaded about a month ago and linked to it from the hompage. Not sure why that is the only page with a pagerank of 5. Maybe Google are still in the processing of updating so it may change but I will keep an eye on it and post the results here.
How did you go in the latest Google pagerank update?