The Branson Pro

Well, it looks like the big G finally updated the toolbar PR cache sometime last night. I remember the last time it was updated - G said they were not going to update it again for all of 2009. Nice try, guys

I saw an increase in the page rank for many of my websites. But some of them did stay the same, due to my lack of link-building efforts for those in particular. I’ve been pretty busy lately with 6 current SEO projects for my clients. So, I’m not always able to work on my own sites.

The really unfortunate thing - this very blog you are reading now is too new to have any PR. In fact, I’m still waiting on Google-bot to come see me it for the first time. So, hopefully it will be soon, maybe a couple more days to get indexed.

Just to clarify - there are actually 3 different  “types” of PR that Google uses:

1. The toolbar PR:

This is the PR cache that G only updates 3 or 4 times each year, on average. It’s not always accurate, due to the slow updating. But it’s about the only way one can estimate the PR for any given website (unless you have access to it via Google Webmaster Tools).

2. Webmaster Tools PR:

This is the PR cache that will be displayed as “Page Rank Distribution” inside of the webmaster tools Crawl Stats. It’s been rumored that this cache is updated about once a week. But none of know for sure.

3. Google’s Internal PR cache:

This is the actual PR cache that Google will use. I’ve heard it is updated continuously, on a daily basis. But once again, none of us know for sure. The internal PR cache is the one used by Google for determining SERPs factors. And this makes sense as it is the most current and up-to-date PR cache.

One thing to remember: building page rank does not guarantee a boost in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Page rank is only one of many factors in the Google algorithm to determine where a website show up for any given search term.

Personally, I focus more on providing relevant content for my visitors, instead of doing SEO work just to build page rank.

And I have sites that are only PR1 and outranking PR5 sites for the same keyword. Why? Because the PR1 site has more relevant content in it.

So remember, if you are doing SEO for the sole purpose of gaining page rank, then you are in it for the wrong reason. Try to focus more on providing quality and useful content that will draw in more visitors and give other webmasters a reason to link to your site.