Google Dance February 2008

[dcz]

A new PageRank Update just occurred in the last week of February. IRL got me on this, but I'll still comment it a bit.

First, it's the shortest time observed in between two updates, last Google dance occurred in January, so it looks like some major change is going one in the way Google deals with update. We cannot conclude right now, this could either mean that PR and Backlinks update will now be made on a shorter time period or that this update was kind of an exceptional adjustment, we should soon know more about this.

Then, about phpBB SEO, it seems to follow the comment I made on last one, Google seems to have some trouble to deal with the large amount of backlinks phpBB SEO has as far as PR (no move, or light decrease), but not for SERPs or referrals.
February is the second month in a row we beat the most visitors ever for the phpBB SEO website despite the decrease in Google backlinks from 13700 to 5500. We even beaten the online record in the beginning of march, and finally ended up with site links in the English world :
http://www.google.com/search?q=phpbb+seo&hl=en

To me this means that Google is moderating backlinks more and more, but still take them into account when computing SERPs.
Nothing really new, PageRank seems to be less and less related to SERPs but rather to the link juice, eg the ability for a given page to transmit "interest" within it's links.
It's kind of a paradox since all this started when Google decided to fight against paid links (which we do not practice here). It now seems that PageRank really is becoming a major factor, if not the only one, to determine prices for link business where before the meaning was more directly related to SERPs and referrals.

Of course, we won't complain about the great success phpBB SEO has in Google SERPs, and PageRank still matters, but as Google recently explained in their Publisher’s Guide to the Web, it's only one of the 200 factor to matter to build SERPs and compute relevancy.

It seems that PageRank definitely lost it's overall meaning, not that it does not matter any more at all, but that it is definitely not enough to evaluate a web-site's real impact or to compare sites.

Half of me is thinking, too bad, PageRank was fun, the other half thinks ho well, PageRank is still fun but what really matters as always are SERPs and referrals.

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[SeO]

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/forums/forums- ... t2922.html