It comes with no surprises, Google’s newest PR and backlinks update took effect and right around the time many Search engine optimization companies thought it would (april 2008). For Blackwood Productions this update is great. Our site Blackwoodproductions.com is an older domain but very new design with new pages and content. With this latest PR update our main page stayed at PR 5 but the update passed a Page Rank of 4 to most of our interior pages which were previously at PR 0! Just like this blog which is now

Now in this day and age we should know that Page Rank doesn’t mean all that much anymore. Page Rank was developed a few years ago to show webmasters what sites had the best link popularity and therefore whom they should try to link with. In effect Google was telling people if you want good ranking results in our indexes then you need links, lots of links, for that better Page Rank. What followed is what I always call the “Webmaster Links War”. You can read more here…… Carnage and Mayhem followed as webmasters were doing everything they could to gain links. From link baiting to link buying. The webmasters became so focused on links that’s all they worked on, as for content, who needed content links were AWESOME! It didn’t take too long for Google to see it’s folly in this plan as website quality quickly degraded.

Google then decided it was going to stop showing every backlink that they had indexed to sites as it was an easy way for webmasters to see who was linking to who and how many links the competition had. Therefore making sure the Link War raged on. When Google removed the feature to see every backlink that a particular site had they figured they would start to put a stop to this behavior. This although a good idea did not really help their cause.

The next step to stop the all out linking extravaganza was to put a stop to the weight that was given by Page Rank and initiated a new ranking they coined “Trust Rank”. Google didn’t make a fancy toolbar to show a site’s Trust Rank instead this is how it worked: When a human viewer loads up a particular website they must ask themselves, “Does this site look trust worthy? Would I be willing to spend my money with them?” This seemed to put the emphasis back onto the quality of the site and not just who is pointing links to it.

With that said you should understand that PR doesn’t mean everything anymore but it is still nice to look at it as if you have achieved something!

Jim Trivolette
“The SEO Doctor”
Blackwood Productions