Google PageRank Updates: January 2007

For those who don't know, Google maintains a numeral rank for each website it indexes. This rank is called the Google PageRank, and is often refered to as the PR of a site. According to Google's toolbar, PageRank is Google's measure of the importance of a page. In fact, a PageRank was one of the very first measures of trust for a website. More often than not, web surfers armed with a PageRank enabled Google toolbar in their browser would not trust a site which reported that the website they were visiting had a Pagerank any lower than 3. Some sites won't even link to another website with a PR of less than 4. It's all pretty paranoid, really.

When we started hearing that Google had updated its PageRank values for websites on about January 7th, 2007, we were getting excited that ours should update soon, as well. As time marched on our PR did not update, and this was making me and my boss more and more nervous (and frustrated). Our main website at Syd's Eastside Auto Parts has been trapped in the Google Sandbox with a lowly PageRank of 1 (on a scale of 0 to 10) for over 6 months, now. I was starting to think of the Google Sandbox as a sandpit filled with only quicksand.

Apparently, we are pretty far down on the list of websites for Google to update. Then, on January 25th, 2007, Google finally showed us a new PageRank of 4 for our website. I was so releived, as we had been fighting for a decent PR value for well over 6 months, and the strain on our business seemed intolerable. I was actually quite happy, having thought we would have to struggle another 3 months, until the next update, without any recognition of our hard work and effort in building the website, our brand, and for our considerable online marketing efforts.

But, Google wasn't done, yet. On Monday I came to work to find that our local shopping, tourism & business listings directory for Southeastern South Dakota, Yankton Shopping, had also been updated to a PR of 3 (from 0). To top this off, today I found that our Automotive Search Network and this blog (which you are reading now), were both among the websites further updated with Google PageRanks of 3 (each, they had both previously been rated 0).

Now, we hope that Google will take into account our last few pages that we put up recently durring the next Google PR Update... Our SydsEastside homepage at Google Pages, and our new Autos & Automotive group at Google Groups. ;)

If you are interested in joining our automotive and motorsports related group, Autos & Automotive, please be sure to check out our Group Welcome Page. We are very interested in signing-up automotive industry professionals, auto enthusiasts, car clubs and motorsports related members!

Look for further announcements concerning our group in the near future!

One thing I should mention, before I close this entry, is that Google's PageRank has not yet updated on all of Google's web servers. In fact, in the course of a day, I will notice that the Google toolbar will report a PR1 and later a PR4 and then flip-flop between the two throughout the day. Once Google updates all of it's servers that serve the Google Toolbar's PageRank, the PR should remain steady throughout the day. Let's hope that it won't take another Google update for the PR to be distributed to all such web servers. Hopefully, Google will address this in the future.

We hope you have a great day/night ahead of you! ;)
- Syd's Eastside Auto Parts