Google Toolbar Pagerank Update: SEOmoz.org's take

Last week we saw some interesting changes in the rankings of many websites, and seomoz.org,
the one stop shop for search related information, ran some aggregate studies to figure out what exactly happened.

Here is his TBPR stats and their take:


These tests were run on 10/24/2007 between 3pm and 10:32pm PST

• 32,856 domains surveyed
• 0 experienced a gain in Page Rank
• 1,264 experienced a drop in Page Rank
• 31,592 experienced no change in Page Rank
• 0% gained Page Rank
• 3.8% lost Page Rank
  

The above does lead one to believe that a change has taken place. What makes it more interesting is that after combing through the top 5 biggest losers, we had confirmed that they all indeed contain paid links. This leads one to believe that perhaps there are some Rodkas present amongst those initially reporting the problem ;)

While this isn't really at all that encouraging, it doesn't really seem as bad as some made it out to be... We then caught wind that there would be a second round of "adjustments," so we re-ran our tests.

This occurred on 10/29/2007 between 12:19pm and 5:28pm PST. This time around we found that a great number of pages experienced a page rank increase.

• 5,499 pages gained in toolbar PageRank
  
• 1 page jumped 6 points
• 4 pages jumped 5 points
• 35 jumped 4 points
• 211 jumped 3 points
• 1,054 jumped 2 points
• 4,194 jumped 1 point

But, with the good does come the bad.

• 9,527 pages experienced a drop in rank this time.

This wave seems much more significant than the initial changes, as the differences in rank are much more dramatic. The pages that dropped in the first round fell at the very most, by 4 points. This time around we saw drops as large as 7 points. However, the pages that took those big hits don't seem to be operating under the guise of legitimacy, but rather are all parked and/or offline. A very interesting observation is some of Google's competitors dropped (albeit by a single point, but still a drop [Yahoo, Altavista, Microsoft, etc]). This could mean nothing, as Google.fr appears to have dropped ranks as well. At a glance it appears that many sites did lose page rank for untold reasons. However, the sites that dropped by the greatest margin did contain paid links.

To read more, and see the enlightening comments click here.