As I noted in my last post, the latest Google PR update on 9/26/2008 was quite abnormal.  Deserving sites that should have got PR actually lost PR.  Undeserving and/or sites not promoted gained PR.  The day after this PR update, and on Google’s birthday, Webmasters are lashing out at Google.  Some are even calling Google’s PR algorithm as being broken and badly neglected.

Here’s some highlights of the talk going on…

In this Digital Point post, a Website owner claims that he received a PR 3 on a page that he posted just yesterday.  He claims it is not even indexed in Google Search yet.

Also in the same thread, this post from another Webmaster claims he received a PR 2 from a blog post he made just days prior.

Well, here comes yet another Google PR update.  It seems that with each update I am left scratching my head how and why Google calculates PR.

I’m not going to name any URLs, but just visualize this.  Two PR 3 directories, which were created about the same time, each having a much different backlink profile.  I will take a look at these in more detail in this post.

The first PR 3 directory has a total of 905 backlinks reported by Yahoo Site Explorer.  Looking at these backlinks, I can see that none have any PR.  In fact, most of the links are from other directories.

When it comes to link building, a great way to develop links is to comment on blogs.  Now I’m not talking about comment spam, but real genuine comments to the posted article.  Quite a few people do this, and many are finding that when they submit their comments they are going to a blank page.

Spam is a huge problem for bloggers.  Just last week I received over 3,000 spam comments.  Fortunately I run Akismet, a plugin for Wordpress that is intended to combat the onslaught of blog spam.  The downside to this is that good/genuine comments can be returned as a false positive.