Why You Shouldn't Panic if Your Google Page Rank Goes Down

Hello! I'm finally back from Online Market World in San Francisco where I enjoyed another great event with some outstanding speakers in a very lively discussion about the benefits of PPC versus Organic search marketing. But today, I wanted to write about a common question I get from folks I talk to at shows as well as clients. And that question is, "Why did my Google Page Rank go down?".

Now I don't want to rehash the constant debate between how important PageRank really is because to be honest I find it a little boring. PageRank is like any other metric for SEO. Pay attention to it, understand and treat it with a grain of salt. Certainly don't spend too much time worrying about your PageRank score because PageRank doesn't always equal rankings. But having said that, it's important to understand how PageRank works if your a professional SEO, and to be able to make it work for you and, let's take a look at some Page Rank basics that will help to explain the question that prompted this post, "Why did my Google Page Rank go down?"

I am going to keep this explanation very high-level and non-technical for the purposes of our discussion. This is not meant to be a thorough explanation of the PageRank algorithm. But essentially PageRank is Google's internal scoring system for how important a Web site is based on the number links that point to a site and how much PageRank each of those links carries with it. It's not so important to understand the actual mechanics of the formula as it is to understand that your PageRank score that Google shows in it's Toolbar, which ranges from 1 to 10 (10 being the most important) is dependent on the number of links pointing to your site and the number of pages that your site has. The confusion for most people is that the number scale of 1 to 10 that Google shows in the Toolbar actually represents a range of "real internal" PageRank points. This scale is known only to some Google employees who will never reveal that information. But to illustrate what I am talking about we will create some hypothetical numbers.



So each interval between one and ten on the Page Rank scale might represent the following real internal points:

PageRank 1 - 0000 to 1000 points
PageRank 2 - 1000 to 5000 points
PageRank 3 - 5000 to 25,000 points
PageRank 4 - 25,000 to 75,000 points
PageRank 5 - 75,000 to 200,000 points
PageRank 6 - 200,000 to 1,000,000 points
PageRank 7 - 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 points
PageRank 8 - 5,000,000 to 20,000,000 points
PageRank 9 - 20,000,000 to 50,000,000 points
PageRank 10 - 50,000,000 + points

Now these are purely hypothetical to illustrate the range of points that could potentially exist between intervals. So the take away here is two fold:

1. It gets increasingly harder to move up in Page Rank.


2. Just because two sites have the same external Page Rank score does not mean they have the same real Page Rank score. In other words, even though two Web sites might have a Page Rank of 5, one site could still have many more internal points thereby giving that site an advantage in rankings over the other.

So now that you have an idea of how the internal system works, here is reason that your PageRank might go up or down even if your internal points don't change:

The points on the scale above are relative to many Web pages currently exist in Google's database. In other words, every time Google updates PageRank through the system (which is at this point pretty much constantly happening), the cutoff points for each of these intervals changes. So today a PageRank 3 might 5,000 to 25,000 points (hypothetically) but tomorrow (or even later today), it might change to 4,000 to 20,000 or some other interval. The score that you see in the Google Toolbar is a snapshot in time of what interval you were in based on your internal points. Because Google only exports this data and updates the toolbar infrequently, the data is outdated by the time you see it which is the reason that many people don't pay much attention to it. But for those that do, it is important to understand that it is possible for your PageRank to fluctuate though no fault of your site. And in fact, this kind of fluctuation will have no effect on your rankings because the only thing that really changed is Google's parameters for what it defines the PageRank intervals to be.

If you want to see more facts, numbers and formulas, below are some patents filed by Google that are all related to PageRank and it's improvements.

• Method for node ranking in a linked database - Sept 4, 2001


• Method for scoring documents in a linked database - Sept 28, 2004


• Method for node ranking in a linked database - June 6, 2006


• Scoring documents in a linked database - September 11, 2007

Now of course, not all drops in PageRank can be attributed to this and certainly a drop of more than one might indicate a different problem. It's always a good idea to have a running list of your most important links and periodically check to see if those links still exist. This can be another valuable tool in understanding the potential reasons for fluctuation in Google PageRank. But the point of this post is to make sure that if you do see a small drop in your PageRank, there is no need to panic and unless it is accompanied by a drop in your rankings, you should just ignore it. Concentrate instead on developing high quality links from relevant sites and your PageRank will take care of itself.

Have a great week!

Catfish