As per a report in searchenginewatch.com Google has updated its PR (long after February 2013). Twitter was already abuzz with updates from webmasters who actually noticed that Google had updated its PR. However, Matt Cutts had earlier indicated that there was no intention from Google’s end to update PR primarily owing to technical issues. The move (that of updating the PR), as a result, definitely came as a surprise.
Thus, searchengine.com reported, “At Pubcon Las Vegas in October, Cutts said we hadn’t seen a recent PageRank update because the pipeline that pushes PageRank data from the internal Google servers to the toolbar broke. There were no plans to fix it, he said, at least not for the remainder of the year. However, it appears that they decided getting this information out to the public was useful enough that they fixed the problem.”
It has further been reported that sites that had been introduced newly since February 2013 had been awarded with PR 1 and PR 2 while those with PR4 and 6 didn’t see much improvement this time. Though it has been suspected that the data regarding the PR update is old, there are some who still believe that since Google receives fresh data in its PR tool (internal) it isn’t really possible that the search engine giant would be using old data.
Here is what Dave Naylor of Bronco had to say, “We looked at hundreds of sites and 90 percent dropped -We’ve not seen many gain PageRank in big leaps this time. We saw PR6s drop to PR1s, but not many PR1s rise to a PR6.”
Bronco is a digital agency and Dave Naylor is the Speaker and Head of Search Marketing at bronco.co.uk. He goes on to state, “My gut feeling is that the PageRank is from when the Google PageRank system broke, so it’s not new PageRank; it’s second hand PageRank from September-ish”.