Google has updated backlink counts and the resulting PageRanks across the web. At Wodu Media we have a vested interest in these calculations: our clients business depends on quality traffic being driven to their websites, and a solid PageRank is a major step towards building trust and authority in your website. After the update, we saw multiple pages across the majority of our sites move up in rank, including: many PR0 to PR2-3 boosts (a normal occurrence); quite a few PR3 to PR4 jumps (nice); four leaps to PR5 (highly exciting); and one push from PR5 to PR6 (where the fun really begins).

Interestingly, our design and entertainment news aggregator website World’s Greatest T-Shirt saw a sharp decline in PageRank (leading to an almost immediate 40% drop in search traffic), but this was an expected consequence of Google’s Panda update in March of this year, which severely punishes duplicate content, burying it so deep in the search you’ll never find it. Gone are the days when you can churn out 20k pages of scraped content a day and quickly garner an equivalent number of daily visitors to that site (Just ask Microsoft how Ciao is doing…).

The table below, compiled on June 27th 2011, one day after Google’s backlink and PageRank update was rolled out, shows websites that have a PageRank of 10. It’s a short list, and, amazingly, Google never found their way onto it.

Title	Page Rank	Google Back Links	Yahoo Back Links	URL
US Goverment website	10	20,400	9,567,199	www.usa.gov
Adobe – Adobe Reader Download	10	176,000	3,380,043	get.adobe.com/reader
United States Department of Health and Human Services	10	9,900	2,336,227	www.hhs.gov
Miibeian	10	71,900	834,681,526	www.miibeian.gov.cn
Adobe – Adobe Flash Player	10	94,800	81,067,365	get.adobe.com/flashplayer
Facebook	10	5,740	2,147,483,647	www.facebook.com
Social Bookmarking Sharing Button Widget	10	92,700	257,427,980	www.addthis.com/bookmark.php
Europeana	10	3,900	147,026	www.europeana.eu/portal
EUA – European University Association	10	1,310	163,999	www.eua.be
The European Library	10	1,310	13,328	search.theeuropeanlibrary.org

Pages downgraded from PR10 to PR9 during the update:
http://www.google.com/
http://india.gov.in/
http://www.gov.cn/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
http://us.cnn.com/
http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.joomla.org/

These shifts in PageRank – along with the Panda update and the recent Google interface redesign – signify that the Google and it’s search algorithm are destined for yet more changes. From this point on, real SEO strategy will be based on the production of quality original content that is of use to the end user.