It seems that Google’s been busy doing something this month. A number of people on one of the forums that I hang out in have said that their sites suddenly dropped in PR. In some cases they went right down to PR0.
What’s going on?
It seems that not enough people are seeing changes in their site rank for this to be called an early page rank update. The consensus seems to be that Google is updating backlinks. Backlinks are links to your site from other sites. Apparently Google does mini updates of these frequently, but when they do a large back link update they are likely removing duplicates and or spam or splog site links. Perhaps that’s why some people’s PR ended up going down. it’s possible that they had a lot of splogs or spammy sites linking to them.
It’s hard to say what’s going on because Google doesn’t announce it’s updates, and tends to keep it’s formula’s for determining page rank and other things related to a sites listing in their search engine secret.
Tricia, it doesn’t matter if site has PR1 or PR7. Of course, it’s a nice feeling to know that my site has got high PR, but it doesn’t have anything to do with traffic.
Long time ago when my primary site went from PR4 to PR5 I was happy as a little mouse with cheese in her mouth. But later my traffic went down. Well, I lost few positions even internal pages on my site has got PR higher than 2. My positions were simply taken by pages with PR0.
The reason was algorithm update. Some time later I determined all problems, fixed them and everything went back and is going better these days.
As you mentioned in your post, backlinks update is very important. It is even more important than PR update. Moreover, I believe that Google has it’s own PR database which isn’t available to public. From time to time it is being transferred to datacenters and Google Toolbar. And this is what’s called “Google PR update”. If you use Google Sitemaps, you can predict your future pagerank about 3-4 months before it becomes public. For instance, medium pagerank means PR5 at least. I don’t know if high pagerank means PR8 because any of my sites has such rank…
All in all, more quality backlinks mean more than PR update.