Google export of PR & IBL update...
Date Published 13/07/2006 - Click here for more recent news
Early evening UK, Thursday 13th July (about mid-day in California) and we start to hear rumblings of a Google update / export of Toolbar Page Rank (PR) and Backward Links (IBLs) in the web forums. EASIserv.com can now confirm that there has indeed been a long-awaited update and this has rolled-out to UK DCs now. This is the first IBL update since 18 Feb and the first PR update since 4 April.
EASIserv.com hasn't made a full assessment yet of its impact on our client websites but as for our own company website - a quick review shows our PR4 remaining steadfast but for reasons best known to themselves they've knocked-out about 50% of our IBLs!
Also noted that some other PR anomalies from the 4 April export have been tidied-up too. Back then, one of our brand-new client websites had somehow gained an aberrant PR5 and that's now been downgraded to a PR3 - which is about where it should have been in the first place.
There'll be much celebrating and squealing (in equal measure no doubt) as there always is at these times - we'll reflect later on any issues we identify downstream and share them with you.
NB: this Google index update follows hard on the heels of MSN who updated their index last Saturday 8th July 2006.
14/07/06 1st update: Forums have noted that some well established websites have lost (toolbar) PR on all pages apart from their Home Page, where PR has remained constant - but all else PR-wise has disappeared. In some cases they've had their IBLs zeroed too. Can't imagine it's a penalty of any kind - just somebody who got lost in the mix. When your index is measured in the billions of pages - some small-fry are bound to slip through the nets.
On some other websites - PR has disappeared from odd subordinate pages, but not all. So it's the usual mixed-bag we've come to expect from the big 'G' in recent updates. Clearly they've got a ways to go to get it right in the post-Big Daddy environment. We wish them well.
14/07/06 2nd update: and then just to complete the trifecta - Yahoo! announced that they too had updated their search index. Rajat Mukherjee noted on the Yblog: "We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index."
So there we have it, within the space of a week, we've got a brand new index from each of 'The Big 3' in turn. We can't remember when that situation last happened - but the good news is that we can switch-off our 'wonder-when' detectors for a while and get on with planning and deploying improvements for the next set of updates. It's never-ending!
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