Weird Google Pagerank Update

Everyone knows that Google is a Search Engine, but not everyone knows what Pagerank is, so I’ll give a brief description of Pagerank before I go on to explain why this update seems to be weird. Basically, Pagerank is an indicator by Google that measures the link popularity of web pages. It takes into account not only the number of links to pages, but also the quality of links. Therefore, a link from yahoo with Pagerank 9 is given higher credit than a link from some unknown page with a pagerank of 2. The exact calculations are as mysterious as the Bermuda Triangle, at least to ordinary folks like me and you. Regardless, I don’t need to know how they do it anyway.

Pagerank ranges from a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the most popular. When you install Google Toolbar and enable the feature, you can see Pageranks of all webpages you visit. Pagerank is one of the factors that Google uses to rank relevant pages on their Results pages, therefore a high Pagerank will play a part in moving your pages up the listings. Now, you can pretty much tell why webmasters are so interested in Pageranks. Considering all other things equal, the higher your Pagerank, the higher your web pages appears in Google and in turn, the more traffic your website will get.

Obviously, there are many other factors that play a part, therefore the search results are not always dominated by pages with high Pagerank. Also, noticed that I used the term web pages, instead of websites? The underlying reason is due to the fact that Pagerank is assigned to every page of a website and not the website itself. Therefore, Yahoo’s homepage has a Pagerank, so does its email service page and every page carries a different Pagerank. Having briefly explained the basics of Pagerank, let’s move on to discuss why I think this update is weird.

I noticed yesterday that the homepage of ActiveJokes.com does not have a Pagerank yet the subpages have Pageranks. The reason why I claimed that this is weird is because all links point to my homepage and it should be the page with the highest Pagerank among all pages within the site. It is simply not possible that Google first found the subpages before finding the homepage. When I make a thread on this weird occurrence, many other forumers replied and claimed they had the same experience. Therefore, this update does appear to be very weird.

However, Google staff has mentioned that the Pagerank as shown in the tool is only a display and does not reflect the true Pagerank at any given time. The tool fetches updated Pagerank from the actual Pagerank once every few months and it does not influence the ranking of pages in any way. Therefore, we should not have to worry that Google Toolbar is reporting Pageranks that do not reflect the actual Pagerank. On the other hand, I’m thinking about the possibility that the actual Pagerank is not being calculated accurately due to some bugs. However, we will never have an answer, so let’s just give Google the benefit of the doubt that the actual Pagerank is correct and it’s only just the display that’s cranky.

I’m quite sure that they will fix this small little issue before some people even realizes, but regardless, it did gave me a topic to blog about for today. Let’s watch and see how the next update goes.