If you are a regular blogger, you must have noticed that i have been frequently blogging about Google Pagerank each and every time it’s updated. So here i am once again blogging about it. Google just updated Pagerank of various website all along the web world, today itself and thus this Pagerank known as Google Pagerank update April’2009.

For the newbies who do not know much about the Google green bar, Pagerank is basically a rating Google gives to your website. Let’s say it ranks you on a scale of 1 to 10, ten being the highest one can achieve. The pagerank updation is actually a continuous on-going process. It is only that Google updates the toolbar pagerank once in a quarter or so, which we webmasters like to term as Pagerank Update.

Time n again, i have mentioned on my blog how useless the Pagerank is. Why even Google employees use to mention it every single time that Pagerank is just a measure taken by Google for it’s own interest and is by no means a judging criterion. Yet many, in fact most webmasters continued to buy/sell space/links etc. on websites or web pages with high pagerank. That’s not a big deal. Even i did that couple of years ago. But Google had other plans. They started penalizing any website that sells pagerank juice to others or even those sites that were spending heavily to get link juice from others. I still remember that i had PR 5 on a blog that i own for phpLD Templates. And as soon as i got pagerank on it, i sold some seven or eight odd links on that blog. Next update Google Pagerank hit a zero on that blog. Till date, even after removing all those links, even after best possible content in that niche, the blog still remains a big fat zero. It’s been 5 or 6 updates after that, but the PR won’t budge. That’s evil cast of selling advertisements on pagerank websites. Good thing with that blog however is that i have my search engine rankings intact. But it has been lot of hard work ever since. Anyways, summarizing the long story, selling links on pagerank base is Bad Bad Bad in eyes of Google. And one should refrain from it.

I did mention above about uselessness of Google Pagerank to a webmaster. However in a recent Matt Cutts interview, i noticed how he was defining branding in the search engine rankings. At two instances he spoke the words “Pagerank” and it’s importance among other factors. Not sure but suddenly pagerank seems to be a big issue with Google. I am yet to discuss this with other webmasters so i think this is a good place to start.

And just for the sake of it, yes, this Google Pagerank has been a little better for my websites. No Pagerank change for SharatJaswal.com but i see Ally Directory getting it’s previous Pagerank back. Strongest Directory got nothing (Remember my rant?). Majority of my directories saw a good increase in pagerank. So pretty good result this quarter.

I hope you can share your thoughts on Google’s sudden importance to Pagerank criteria. Also i hope this Pagerank has been good for you!

Update: If you read the comments, you will understand why am linking this YouTube video of Matt Cutts. It’s a little question on branding and just notice how Matt Cutts brings in “PageRank” with all factors as far as searching goes.