Google Updates Page Rank and Webmaster Center 1-29-08

The new year has started out with both Yahoo and Google making some significant changes to their indexes. 2007 ended with the normal year-end Google Dance and the SERP’s shuffling that we have all come to look forward to every holiday season. 2008 is starting out with some positives at least.

Google Page Rank Update January 2008

Last Thursday (1-24-08) saw a minor change in Page Rank for many sites. While domain level Page Rank remained the same on the 70 or so sites that I monitor daily, many of the internal Page Rank on pages changed, or was added. I have noticed that pages and especially blog posts that were created up to November 17th now have Page Rank.

I have a feeling that this is a new plan for Google, that they are going to be quicker about assigning Page Rank to internal pages than they have been in the past. In the Google Webmaster Center under Statistics > Crawl Stats you can see what your average Page Rank is, as well as Page Rank that has yet to be assigned:

 

 

 

 

 

The Page Rank not yet assigned was pretty much blank for all the sites that I noticed had gotten Page Rank updates on their pages. This is a good sign that Google is getting quicker with the PR updates. Usually the interior pages are updated along with the domains every 4 months or so. If they are doing them separately now, that will be good for Webmasters who rely on Page Rank to set the price for advertising on their sites.

Google Webmaster Center Gives You Control Over Site Links

When you do a search for a company or website, Google will put up what it feels are the most relevant in-site links. They have no given us a smattering of control over these Sitelinks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Webmaster Center you can now block URL’s that you might not want to appear in the SERP’s. Under the Links tab there is now an option for Sitelinks:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google explains Sitelinks as:

Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents.

Because we generate sitelinks dynamically, this list can change from time to time.

This is good news for sites that have pages they don’t want to appear in the SERP’s for a company search. I don’t know how comfortable I feel about having Google “block” anything, but you never know. The fact that they are working with us to give us more control over our sites and how they appear in Google, is a good sign.

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