Isn’t it about time that Google had a little look at how hard and fast Wikipedia is ranking in the SERPs?  Wikipedia now ranks number 1 for the term “pagerank“, with the official Google PageRank page at 2. 

Not sure how long this has been the case, but aren’t we beyond the point where perceived authority takes precedence over relevancy?

Google obviously needs a SEO – their title tags are shocking!  Perhaps they should give BMM a shout? Their PageRank article had awesome title tags!

Scott

Andrew Hunter asks: “Will the data centers using the slightly older infrastructure be updated in due course, or will my PR be split by data center for the next couple of months?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it took at least 1-2 months for the other data center IPs to get the newer infrastructure in some way.”

New Jersey SEO asked: “Will this PR update affect SERPs? Are we going to have also a SERP data refresh / update?”

“…you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export”

Worth a read for anyone that is confused about (or cares about) Google PageRank.  Better than this article anyway.

MG

Actually the first part of the article is quite a nice explanation of how the Google Toolbar PR updates and why it can fluctuate during update times.

However it would seem that Big Mouth Media are a little too SEO focused and have “somewhat” over-optimised the article.

Aside from the pretty spammy title (“Google PageRank Update, Page Rank Update and Page Rank Explained”), the article loses a great deal of consistency when trying to cover misspellings (PageRank and Page Rank used often).  “PageRank” is the preferred term guys.   Fair enough, I’m sure lots of people cover misspellings when trying to optimise for Goggle.

BMM go on to say:

“PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank PageRank”

OK that’s not a direct quote – I’m reading between the lines there – but that’s the gist of it.

Interestingly, Big Mouth Media do claim that Google PageRank can be affected by:

• The strength of a brand
• Traffic
• The quality of a website’s design (noting that pop-ups could have a negative effect on PageRank)
• Relevancy (to pages that link to you)

Huh.  Granted, the statements have been caveated by saying that these areas may directly or indirectly affect Google PageRank, but still tenuous at best.  A big brand naturally collects organic links (therefore more PR).  More traffic means more chance of organic link growth (more PR).  Website design?  Dodgy link there at best.  Relevancy?  Well, sure people are more likely to link to you if your site is relevant to theirs but…

What is it with SEO agencies churning out psuedo content just for the sake of it?  Over-optimising articles with fluff content just to justify “news items”?  Sigh.  Or perhaps for some brand protection to maybe, oh I don’t know, push some undesirable results (like ”BigMouthMedia Banned“ or “BigMouthMedia Spotlight“) down a little (this is wonderful btw – http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/06june/article072.html)?

I suppose it might just be some link baiting – churn out some inaccurate content and hope someone corrects it.  Guess I’m the chump then.

MG