Google Page Rank Update Rewards ‘Timely’ Links
Google performed another Page Rank (PR) update on Monday, April 28, 2008. Some websites’ PR went up; others went down.
With this update, I noticed a possible favoritism Google lended to newer links from social media sites. One of my websites has 10,000 incoming links, but no ‘fresh’ links from coverage in the social news media in recent months. The result of this last PR update was that site was taken down a notch in the PR rating.
Meanwhile, I had two smaller websites receive PR increases with fewer, but newer links. The news content and links were published to Digg and other social news websites. Delicious, Stumble Upon, and other social bookmarking sites were utilized, along with a presence in the blogosphere in more in recent weeks and months. RSS feeds were used along with a Wordpress blog and forum posts. These sites connected through the social media were impacted positively in the PR update- each moved up two notches on the PR scale. Not bad.
My hunch is that Google’s algorithm was tweaked to include more ‘timely’ link activity- especially valuing social news, bookmarking, PR newswires, and other sites showing reliably fresh content.