No Comments Written by Robert on July 25, 2008 – 8:25 pm

Since yesterday Google started to change the page Rank of each and every website. Matt Cutts, on his blog said:

Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.

On his blog, here.

He also said, in a comment:

…it could be a few days before people see the toolbar PageRank changing, unless they go poking around on different datacenter IP addresses.

All major page rank checkers are down or not checking the right data center. A guy has developed a nice and simple tool located here:

http://www.tareeinternet.com/scripts/pagerank/

This tool check your Page Rank against the Data center where Google updated it’s page Rank.

Google update 1 datacenter then this datacenter will “push” the data to the others. The reason sometimes people see the update in some geographic locations and not others is due to Google’s load balancers.

When you do a query for search or toolbar Pagerank, this will go to the “closest” datacenter with the least amount of load. If one of these updated datacenters is close to you, then you see the updated data.

This tool “forces” your query to a specific DC no matter where you are located, and this is the updated DC.

With this tool I see that Stylishdesign.com will have Page rank of 1 and Maxwebdesign.eu will have Page Rank of 3. This information is relevant to the posts I wrote yesterday.

Regarding the “older penalties” Cutts is speaking about… I don’t know what he wanted to say. All I know is how to avoid being penalised:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a Web site that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to Web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the Web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Recommendations:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known Web sites).

It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If your Web site is mistakenly penalized for spam your best course of action is to contact the search engine and discuss remedies. If you are applying a technique that is considered spam, get rid of it. Know what is considered search engine spam and avoid it before it ever becomes a problem for you.

So if a website was panalised for one of the reasons I explained in the past year, and if the “trick” was removed, website “repaired” the penalization will be removed… about these days.

Update:

Just after i published this post and refreshed Firefox 3 (the latest Firefox version) the Search Status 1.26 (http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/) came up with the values the tool I presented to you read from the updated Data center.

This is for maxwebdesign.eu

This is for this blog.

If you are wondering, what Is PageRank? Without getting into too much detail, PageRank is essentially a score out of ten as to the “value” of your site in comparison to other websites on the Internet. It is based on two primary factors; the number of links you have pointing to your website and the value of the links pointing to your website. The value is calculated based on the PageRank of the page linking to you and debatably the relevancy of the page linking to you (there is no hard evidence to back up the relevancy factor in regards to PageRank that is seen, however it definitely is a factor in your overall ranking).