Just about everyone in the online marketing community was surprised when they woke up to find that Google had updated their PageRank system. Matt Cutts had all but said that it wouldn’t happen again in 2013, and the fact that it had been 10+ months since the last update had many people thinking that the system wasn’t ever going to get a refresh. Cutts, however, confirmed that the PR system was indeed updated in a tweet where he said, “team was fixing a different backend service and did a PR update along the way.”
Interesting that it seems that the update was just an afterthought by the Google team. They were working on an unnamed system, and just did an update. It would seem to imply that updating the PageRank system is a fairly simple process for Google, which will undoubtedly cause many to wonder why they don’t update it more often. Many marketers love the simplicity of the system, allowing them to get a quick ‘report card’ style grade from Google without having to do much work.
The fact that this update was just something that they happened to run while performing other work also seems to say that they won’t be doing more frequent updates. I would guess that the PR system is still going to be slowly phased out over the next year or two. Google still hasn’t offered new toolbars for the latest internet browsers, and have made no comments which would lead anyone to believe that they will be performing another update any time soon.
Whatever happens in the future, however, marketers are certainly happy to see the update this time. Or at least the ones who had their PageRank bumped up with this latest change.
Did you see any PR change with your sites? Comment below!
