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The calm before the storm

Wednesday, 10 January 2007 google news pagerank

Well for anyone that doesn’t know already, the Internet is on the verge of Google’s PageRank refresh. This means they check to see how many people are linking to you, how “good” their sites are and assign you a value from 0 to 10 (10 being the best). This value gets used when ranking your site against other sites and can mean a very large difference in the amount of traffic your site gets from Google.

Over the years I’ve bounded all over the place. When I first thought to check it, I had PR1. Since then I’ve been up to PR4 then back to PR0 and now I’m PR6. As I’ve just said, the number of sites linking to you is a major factor and this is going to be my downfall for the next PR season – I just haven’t been promoting it enough or writing things that people want to link into…

So I’m expecting it to go down… But I don’t know how much I’m going to lose yet.

I’ve been using one tool from iWebTools to query all the different Google servers for my ranking for some time. This season it has been showing me PR6 on 90% of the servers and PR1 on the remainder. Here’s what I see now though:

PageRank

Without a better phrase, I’m bricking my pants. When some of the servers start showing 0 you tend to feel that might be epically bad news! But, as a late bit of research I’ve just put 9rules.com through the tool and they have some servers showing PR0 too. This probably means they stop serving PR requests when they’re updating.

Well I wish EVERY reader the best of luck with this season of PageRank and be calm and try to remember it’s not the end of the world if you go down… That’s what I’m chanting to myself anyway =\

Good luck.

Edit a few hours later: 80% of the servers say PR0. Now I’m worried.

Edit a few seconds later: 80% of the servers say PR0 for 9Rules too. *stops holding his breath*

Edit on the next day: Having hit a low of 6x PR6 servers, they’re now coming back. Up to 15x PR6.

Ironically my younger and now relatively unused domain, kittenauth.com, has full PR6 at the moment… even though it’s still in sandbox mode with Google.

Both congratulations and commiserations to Seopher who got off the PR0 mark but only went as far as PR2 =(