Over the last two weeks we have been talking about Google every other day. This time it is the Page Rank. Google Juice, Google flux, Back links, all have been jumping around a lot lately. Changes both in Page Rank and back links count numbers have been extremely noticeable.And this morning I wake up and see some of my sites with increased PR. BostonMediaDomain went from a PR0 to a PR2.
I tried to check on Googles data centers but most of them are behaving strangely (reporting a PR0 even for established websites). One tool that appears to be working is this one.
This is either a new Page Rank push to the Tool bar or it is still some data fluctuations of the old PageRank push.
No one was expecting such an early PageRank update in 2008. The last one, as you probably can remember, happened late in October and it created a lot of buzz due to a new policy that Google decided to adopt towards websites that were selling text links without the nofollow tag.
Some people are arguing that since the PR drop is not generalized, it must be a slap from Google due to practices that conflict with its guidelines. Andy Beard suggested that the sites that got penalized were either selling links or exchanging them inside large blog networks. This is a feasible explanation given that most of the Weblogs, Inc blogs (Engadget above all) were penalized, and they do not sell paid links either.
There is also some activity going on the Digital Point Google forum, which indicate that some change is indeed happening right now.
Keep in mind that we are talking about the toolbar PageRank, that one that you are able to see with your browser. Real PageRanks get updated continuously.
I tried to use some of the prediction and cross datacenters tools to see if the change was trackable from them, but most are not working anymore.
Have you noticed any changes?