I was alerted (thanks Jordan) that across all many some data centers, many sites now have their PageRank dropped down to zero, including such prominent domains as the New York Times and TechCrunch, but also Yahoo, and strangely enough Google itself. With this change in PageRank, one does wonder whether or not PayPerPost has truly been singled out, or this is an attempt to destroy (and perhaps rebuild?) PageRank as a metric once and for all.
More as it comes in.
Update: Ionut from Google Operating System has chimed in below — what we see on the toolbar is probably the official pagerank. Perhaps the PageRank zeroes have more to do with datacenter updates than anything else.
Update: In hand checking some of IP for data centers at http://www.digpagerank.com/, it seems like many data centers are not in fact down; the conflicting results, coupled with the persistent zero level at the tool-bar level of previously “zeroed” blogs suggests that this is likely, in fact a data center issue. Thank goodness there’s a question mark at the end of that title. ;)
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Sounds more like a case of a broken PR tool to me.
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Tony, I don’t see it. I checked manually and using multi-datacenter tools, and everything looks fine. What method did you use to see the PageRank of these sites?
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A much more likely scenario is that there’s a technical glitch…
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I used 3 different tools, such as Check Page Rank, What’s my Page Rank, and Smart Page Rank. I checked 5-10 different sites, including my own and popular sites such as WSJ and Techcrunch. All zero.
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(but I agree that it’s probably a glitch. Wouldn’t it be cool though if it wasn’t? If you take away the score, then what’s the goal? — especially given personalized search results.)
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Yep — I do think that this is an issue of Google recalibrating its PageRank.
What’s interesting is that this kind of correction has happened twice in the span of weeks, when public PageRank adjustments usually take months — some have lasted as long (longer?) than 6 months.
One wonders what’s going on at Google these days with the frequent changes / updates.
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Michael,
Checked the following:
http://www.checkpagerank.com/
http://www.smartpagerank.com
and a few others.
You’re right though, in that some still display the right pagerank, and a few of them will say “service inactive”.
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Did you check the toolbar (the only official way to find Google PR for a site)? I guess not.
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Ionut,
Fair enough — so what am I seeing then? Is it a data center glitch?
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My site registered a PR 0, as did a few others I checked, but then mine (PR5) and the others showed their regular page ranks on the Google Toolbar. How odd…
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BROKEN PR checker tool… PRs are just fine for all those sites (checked with numerous other tools)
so yeah… technical glitch.. don’t rely on just 1 site next time… cross check.
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ALL PR tools display a zero for A Writer’s Edge blog (formerly known as “5″). Not guilty of supposed violations, nothing has changed except daily post. Is there a light at the end of this gloomy tunnel? Will I get back lost advertising? Avoid blogicide?
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Georganna — thanks for the info. There have been a few sites that have indeed been swept up as collateral damage with the most recent correction. As you have never had any paid postings or dealings with PPP, I wonder if you’re in such a group. Try and ask to be re-appraised by Google through the Webmaster dashboard if there’s no wrong-doing, and keep your fingers crossed. If we hear of anything new, we’ll post it here. Good luck!
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i would like to believe that is’s just a broken PR tool.
oh please let it be just a broken PR tool not “Google singles out PPP”.
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yeah mine also is zero but the little plugin I use in firefox which shows the pagerank in the status bar shows the right pagerank.
??
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It’s pretty weird. I know that it’v got all my sites cross-linked (okay this isn’t a blog), but every single one is swhoing pr of zero. It takes me about a year to get good serps on a site (trying to do it the natural way etc) and I do cross link between my sites and submit articles linking back to my sites, and swap links etc etc, but it’s all organic and I do try to avoid black hat techniques. Thing is, my sites haven’t moved in their serps and I’ve seen just as much activity as I normally do. Reckon this has to be a way of Google getting rid of a very abused tool. How many links are sold on the basis of the hosts PR? Reckon it could kill a whole industry here. Good idea to kill off PR? I think so. Sort of levels the playing field a bit.
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After reading your blog, I especially like this entry (ing: Google Drops EVERYONE’S PageRank To ZERO? : The Blog Herald).