Google PageRank, the arbitrary ranking system instituted by Google has recently been updated for some of my websites. I don’t pay too much attention to this statistic because it’s important to have multiple sources of traffic and not to rely on any single source. I do, however, note when the rankings are updated because they typically mean my sites will be moving around in the search results which can have an impact on my bottom line.

Average PageRank for the majority of my sites until today was 5 (on a 0-10 scale). I don’t have any sites that have broken a 6 or higher. Today’s update seems to have made some changes, bringing most of my sites down to a 4 with one or two 5’s mixed in for good measure. During a period of change, there’s always a little fluctuation and the results don’t finalize for a day or so. It’s actually a little terrifying sometimes when your PageRank drops from a 5 to 0 for several days while Google updates its index!

Like I said, PageRank is just one measure of site performance and is in no way a stand-alone indicator of a site’s health. A far better indicator is my own personal gut feeling that my sites provide useful and relevant information and resources and the traffic statistics to support it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 2:05 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.