Google's Still Playing with the PageRank
Fri, 16 November, 2007 – 11:22 am
After all the excitement over the PageRank Update that had finally surfaced, it looks like Google is still playing. Dave noticed yesterday that his PR was now displaying as zero, nothing, nada. This means, since the start of the year he's gone from 5 to 4 at easter, to 3 when they made what seemed to be the manual adjustments, to 2 after the PR update, down to zero now! I did a quick check on my sites and noticed than one of my PR4 pages had dropped to a 3.nnA friend of mine had put up a new design for his site and had a heading called 'Site Sponsors' under which my site was listed along with a couple of his own. I pointed out that having that heading there could possibly cause problems for his own site and for mine and recommended that he change it. Now the strange thing is, he did and within 24-48 hours his PR changed from a 2 back to a 3, which it had been before the recent update. Personally, I can't see a small wording change make a difference, but I can confirm the PR went up.nnI've checked these figures on multiple data centres just to be sure we're not just connecting to a different one than average, however they're all outputting the same rank.nnSo it seems like Google has finished playing yet, and before I get a 101 comments on how PR should be ignored etc. I know, and I don't really worry about it, however it's interesting to see what sillyness* they're going to do next and changing Dave's site from a 5 to a 0 in the space of 8-9 months makes a bit of a mockery of the whole PageRank really.nn* Now watch mine go down to zero 
Looks like this zeroing is happening to a few others as well – Zerorank – more PageRank carnage from Andy Beard.
By Sarah on Fri, 16 November, 2007
Exactly why I wrote my recent post. Ignore it and it'll go away – my mother always says.
By Mark Penix on Fri, 16 November, 2007
Mark I completely agree. I personally don't use Google for search apart from when a client phones asking me to search on it. Still, from what I've read, this zero ranking may be temporary, who knows!nnFor anyone that's interested Mark's post on Google is Google and the Negative Impact of PageRank
By Sarah on Fri, 16 November, 2007
I noticed my pagerank zeroed out last night. I'm like, when will this end. Does it matter? Should I worry? I'm not even sure what to think anymore.nnSo I'm off to read some of the posts linked to above
By Empress on Fri, 16 November, 2007
Sorry to hear that Empress. I know we all say ignore it but it's still hard to when that green bar has disappeared.nnI can see sites that I know sell links are slowly losing PR, whereas others aren't. I'm wondering whether promoting the likes of Text Link Ads is also causing people to get penalised. As I said, it just makes a mockery of the whole system. They should just stop showing PR on the toolbar because it clearly has no relevance these days (not that it had much before all of this hoohaa started).
By Sarah on Fri, 16 November, 2007
The problem though is that even though we as internet savvy people say ignore it eveyone else always asks about it. and they all download the toolbar.
By Slee on Sun, 18 November, 2007
This is why I've been saying Google should stop making PR publicly available, if they don't want people to attempt to "buy" PR. I can't figure out why they don't just keep it to themselves.nnTwo of my sites zeroed out last night, but they still come up just fine when I search for their keywords in Google.nnI have a feeling this is just a dance. I noticed when using a Future Pagerank tool, I got zeroes on EVERY domain, even the ones that show PR in the toolbar. So it's probably just sort of a glitch.
By Sapphire on Sun, 18 November, 2007
Slee you're right. I even have clients that know their PR and get concerned over it, believing it's a mark of how good their site is or how busy it is.nnSapphire I agree entirely. Why make it public, what is the real point besides Google wanting everyone to talk about them. It seems that their zeroranking isn't affecting any search engine results which just goes to show that public PR is not to be trusted nor is it a mark of anything relevant!
By Sarah on Mon, 19 November, 2007