You can hear them echoing thought the cyber landscape. Webmasters everywhere are busily checking their PageRank and the PageRank of their friends and competitors. Then it’s off to their favorite webmaster hangouts, posting away about how much that little green bar has changed and which direction it went, north or south. What’s all the fuss about; well it seems that Google is once again updating the PageRank that they display on their toolbar.

So what SHOULD this mean to us webmasters?

It SHOULD mean nothing! PageRank is nothing more then an outdated thermometer. It’s showing you the temperature from some random day and time in the past. Even the current “update” is showing data that is about three months old. Oh, and that little green bar becomes more unreliable as each day passes.

Remember, PageRank is purely mathematical! It is a measure of the number of links pointing to a given webpage AND the PageRank of those links. Everyday, every hour, every minute those numbers are changing. If you could see a snapshot of all the links that are involved in the PageRank of any given page on the web —right now, then take another look again in a few hours, you’d already be seeing a number of differences. Give it a week and that snapshot will be almost unrecognizable. Yet, the toolbar probably won’t be updated again for several months.

So this same madness happens every three months or so when the great Google decides to throw a few crumbs our way and do its PageRank update…

Now keep in mind, we webmasters aren’t actually allowed to use the PageRank data. We can’t do any reciprocal linking – we’ll be penalized for that. Don’t even think about buying or selling a high PR link, Google has a special manual reporting mechanism for that unspeakable infraction. No, we’re only allowed to look wistfully at that pretty green bar and dream of the day when all those generous webmasters (the chosen ones with the fat PageRank) decide to help us out and link to us without being asked to do so…

Boy, I can’t wait for that day to come!

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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