It has been a long time since the last Google PageRank update – 182 days to be precise – but one started on the 29th October 2007, UK Time. This is the longest time we’ve ever had to wait for the PageRanks to be publicly viewable. The last one was on the 30th April 2007, and that was actually the third one that happened this year, with two others happening in January.

We first got an idea it was happening because the PageRank on some sites which sell links had decreased. Google did warn about this and they have now done it – so if you have paid for links for SEO purposes, you may well find your PageRank has suffered too. Andy Beard has a good article on this.

Obviously, because Nearly Home Time went live in late September, it is just too new at the moment to get any PageRank. However, two other sites I am involved with, which went live in late August, have jumped straight in with a PageRank of 2, which I think is pretty impressive for such new sites. They do have the benefit of having some good PageRanked sites linking to them which is why I think this has happened, but they are still very low traffic sites at the moment.

Googles PageRanks are updated all the time of course, it is just that they only make them publically available at seemingly now random times. We can have a good guess at how our sites are going by using Google Webmaster Tools, and going to:

Statistics > Crawl Stats

This will show the general spread of the the pages with the highest PageRank. For this site, Google currently only have data for September.

From an SEO perspective, there are doubts as to whether the PageRank does have any impact on the position of the site in the Search Results. A site I know well has a PageRank of 0, but has been occupying number one spot of the Google results pages for about 3 of its main keywords for about 6 months now. However, it does give a good indication of how well our site is doing though, and its always nice to see a number higher than 0!