Survey Says: No Sites Gained & Many Lost PageRank

Nov 6, 2007 at 9:07am ET by Barry Schwartz

SEOmoz reports that after reviewing the PageRank scores of over 30,000 web sites, none of them showed any PR gains and about 4 percent registered a drop after Google’s first big wave of PR changes. In a second wave, there were finally some gains.

SEOmoz had 32,856 domains that are monitored through tools offered to its members at the time it ran its PageRank survey on October 24. Of these domains, none showed a PageRank gain and 1,264 — 3.8 percent — had a drop.

This data reported the changes from the first major PageRank update that targeted sites selling links, following a very limited update that happened in early October.

Didn’t some sites see an increase in PageRank during this first round? Yes, but only those who had a PageRank of zero, from what I can tell. I have been watching the buzz in the forums on this topic for weeks now, and the only sites realizing an increase in PageRank are sites that had a PR0 or were brand new sites.

When the survey was run again on October 29, about 5,500 “pages” (versus domains said in the first survey, but they may have meant domains) gained ranks.

The second survey happened after Google did another PageRank update. SEOmoz feels this second update was a traditional PageRank update independent of the lowering of PageRank for paid links. However, some felt the update was done to correct penalty errors, such as seemed to be the case with YouTube, which was dropped to a PR3.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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