Page Rank Update January 2008

Continuing my look at the January 208 Google Page Rank Update and comparing it to the October 2007 Update.

It's strange to note that some of the blog pages on this site that were page ranked by the last update seem to have continued with their page rank, but new pages have not got a rank, and the monthly archive pages also seem to have lost their page ranks. On the whole, most changes are new sites getting PR0 or odd pages going down.

What is interesting to look at is the change to my experimental blogs. Both were only a couple of weeks old at the October update and went to PR0.

The one linked to using target="_blank" is still showing PR0. Then something strange happens... For October, the archive page is Grey Barred, but 5 posts are PR2, 2 are Grey Barred. For November, the archive is PR2 and all 4 posts Grey Barred. December has the archive as PR2 and all posts PR0.

On the site not using target=_blank, has now gone to PR3. This time, the October archive is again Grey Barred, but the posts are this time split 2 PR2 and 5 PR0. November has 1 PR1 and the rest Grey Barred. December is PR0, with 1 PR2 and 2 PR0.

As for the site with no links, well it's home page is Grey Barred, as you might expect, as are most of the pages. But 1 October post, 1 November post and the November archive are PR0. Now this is not the pattern you would normally expect, and I think this might be very important in analysing the results of the experiment.

I suspect that people with RSS feeders are linking to the blogs by publishing some entries and I'm gaining Page Rank from them. Very useful, but I should have prevented that to get accurate results... If we accept that some posts / archives having better PR than we expect are caused by this, then the result so far is that by including 'target="_blank"' in an incoming link, you are absolutely destroying that link. Having also looked at my own web design site, the portfolio page that links to a lot of sites using that command has also dropped. This could be accident (more tomorrow???) or maybe part of the same thing. Maybe Google is using the heavy inclusion of 'target="_blank"' as an indicator of link building, and punishing the page the links are on, meaning that there is no PR for the target pages to inherit.