My Happy New Year From Google: Lower PageRank

Dec 31, 2009

UPDATE: Google has changed their mind at some point, I now – April 27, 2010 – have a Pagrank of 6 again.
In checking the PageRank of my blog in the last hours of the last day of the year, I discovered that Google recently downgraded my blog from a PageRank of 6 to a PageRank of 5.

Note to non-techies: This change in PageRank means that my blog will not turn up so high in search rankings on particular topics. Invented by Google co-founder Larry Page (hence the name PageRank), the system ranks web pages on the basis of how many inbound links they receive. I am not sure why mine has suddenly fallen.

Rather than lament Google’s clear error in judgment, I would like to thank all of the readers from around the world with whom I have enjoyed interacting!

The image here, courtesy of Google Analytics, is a chart of where you are from and how you found my blog. (I have no idea why the total numbers of visitors are different in each of the charts. Another Google mystery.)

Thanks for visiting and – ahem – if you have a friend over at Google, let them know about this terrible mistake.

Happy New Year!

Tom

Discussion

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View Comments for “My Happy New Year From Google: Lower PageRank”

jogjaparfum

surely there is something wrong in the blog that makes you so down pagerank
thomascrampton

perhaps i am just getting dull. (Are you a real person or a spambot? you user name is very odd)
Anti_Aging_Doctor

PageRank or no, the reach of your social media blog is astonishing - 400,000 visits from 16,000 cities!

Given the parlous state of the newspaper industry, you have positioned yourself well for the day when there are only two papers left - the London Times and the tissue roll in everyone's bathroom.
Fili

Ask any SEO consultants and they'll tell you that the toolbar updates for Pagerank mean almost nothing nowadays, and certainly do not mean that you'll rank lower on some of "your" keywords. The actual real pagerank updates much more frequently and page rankings on keywords searches depend on much more than just your general website authority as generally indicated by pagerank.

Which is to say - don't worry about it.

Happy new year.
thomascrampton

Fili: I am glad to hear that I am not going to evaporate from the Internet! In support of your point, I don't know when I lost the PageRank of 6, but the last time I checked was probably about 6 months ago. During that time I have seen no drop in traffic. (If the PageRank only happened recently, perhaps I will see a drop in traffic.)
All Roads

man.. thanks for making my year feel small.

Seriously, that is a great set of stats, and you should also keep in mind that Google does not track your RSS readership, so in all likelihood your actual readership is 4-5 times what Google puts out there.

All the best in 2010
R
thomascrampton

Rich: Thanks for that info. I find it amazing in the supposedly measurable medium that not only do I get different stats from Wordpress and Google, but Google cannot even give me one set of stats!
AlexBowman

Congrats Tom, err, sort of. Looking at that graph makes what's often taken for granted mind-blowing, residents of 16k+ cities are reading what you write, and joining a conversation. I think that's a far more important number to dwell on than an ordinal rank imposed by an algorithm, damn those Engineers! :D
thomascrampton

Yes, Alex, I agree completely. It is way too easy to take that spread of readership for granted. There was an era (just a few years ago) when only a giant publisher or broadcaster could reach a global audience like that. Have a great new year!