Is Google PR getting more importance than is due to it? It would seem so considering the barrage of threads on different webmaster forums with respect to the impending PR update. DP, Sitepoint, Namepros all have various threads where one of the members seems to have noticed a PR change to one of his sites and declares that the PR update is underway. There are numerous replies to such threads, most of them inconsequential.

Originally, PR was designed in such a way so that the importance of a page could be identified based on a number from 0 to 10 - 0 being lowest importance and 10 being the highest. The logic is, if more sites link to your site, then yours is an important site and has relevant content. Fair enough. It went wrong when webmasters were able to manipulate the PR by linking their own sites to each other and also by buying links from other sites. This meant that sites with no valuable content could have higher PR than other sites which are more useful. (more…)

I started six month ago with Google Page Creator (GPC) to use it for a kind of personal log about projects and websites. I created a three page website in Dutch language to get some experience about the features and I think it’s an easy to use tool but with basic possibilities.

I got also a PageRank of 4 after the first PR update! The bad site is that I have almost ZERO visits because the pages are not high listed in Google. Next I thought, maybe it’s because of the dutch language, thats why I translated the page into the English language this weekend.

On th other site, I can’t remember that I found any GPC in the Google SERP’s within the last 6 month… Maybe because Google doesn’t spider/search their own Google (GPC) pages? The pages of my GPC site are listed in the search engine if I use the “site:” command, but I need a 4-5 words phrase to get my pages listed…

I hope the existents of GPC pages within the top50 of the SERP’s is possible, otherwise this tool is worthless in times of MySpace, Squidoo and other Web 2.0 communities.

No, I don’t think so, but finally there is a standard for website submission in our sight. The three biggest search engines will continue the development together of the sitemap format introduced by Google. Finally you need only one sitemap to include all your websites pages into these three search engines!

Read here the original Google Blog post and visit also the new Sitemap project website.

On the blogger site for Alexa I found today this interesting statement:

Google and MSN have been going back and forth for the #2 spot in the Alexa Rankings for the last 8 months or so. Google had been on track to displace MSN as the second most popular site on the Web (behind Yahoo) and has in fact done so briefly and repeatedly only to be beaten back by MSN. But now it is beginning to look like Google is fading. When you dig in and take a closer look at the Reach and Pageviews, you’ll see that Google’s Reach (number of users) consistently exceeds MSN’s but MSN’s Pageviews outstrip Google’s by a fair margin. Because Alexa’s rank is based on a combination of Reach and Pageviews, these two have been neck and neck in the rankings…

I think if MSN has more page views than Google the reason could be the quality of results… (more…)