Photo by Storm CryptI have hundred of websites and domain names in just about every vertical you could imagine, literally. The websites function as a test bed for my SEO and PPC experiments, a source of income in most instances and best of all, insight to many of the sensors search engines use as Ranking Factors for the search engine result pages (SERP’s).
The key to my insight is running some form of website analytics on every site. No one site really tells me what is brewing with any given engine, instead the birds eye view helps me see potential changes to the ever shifting ranking landscape.
After spending considerable time sifting through several dozen reports I noticed a change on or around the 8th of October. Albeit some of the changes were minor and insignificant but I have a bunch of steady Eddy sites that perform very consistently for traffic in some very niche keywords and search engine performance. I have guidelines and flags set to alert me when something goes wonky and sure enough some of the indicators were off, both positive and negative.
On October 28th I posted to my twitter account the following message to see if anyone else saw something change.
Fully two days later the Google update hit across the board. From SEORoundtable.com October 30, 2009 Google October 2009 Toolbar PageRank Update
“There seems to be a Google Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. We have threads on the topic at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum. The update seemed to have started sometime yesterday afternoon and many SEOs and webmasters are chatting about it now.
The last PageRank update prior to this one was in June 2009, which may have just been a technical quirk because the one prior to that was just a month before in May.
In any event, like I say every time:
Yes, a Toolbar PageRank update means nothing in terms of your ranking changing anytime soon. The PageRank scores shown in the toolbar are outdated and have zero direct impact on your Google rankings. That doesn’t mean that PageRank has no influence, but the toolbar score does not have any influence. Google shows us one thing, but yet uses another thing.”
