Tag Archives: pagerank

Decreases in MozRank and Page Authority

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I have noticed a decrease in MozRank and to a much lessor extent Moz Page Authority on many of my sites very recently. I don’t know if it is some major MozRank update (I don’t see other posts about it, so probably not) or is just related to my sites. I don’t follow that closely but on the sites I visit a lot I noticed a decrease today (which doesn’t necessarily mean it happened today).

My sites that I visit a lot are blogs and are interrelated so I could imagine a change could cascade through all of them.

They are still doing well so I am not worried but it is always nicer to see increases than decreases.

Looking at a couple it seems like MozRank went down most, and Moz PA went down slightly if at all. Examples (I am trying to remember the previous rankings so I might be off by a bit – they don’t normally change much so I haven’t bothered tracking more than about twice a year)

Format:
[my memory of recent values to today (and August 2014 values)

site 1 from 64 and 6.3 to 64 and 5.6 (August 2014 values: 52 and 6.0)
site 2 from 60 and 6.2 to 58 and 5.3 (59 and 6.0)
site 3 from 63 and 6.2 to 59 and 5.2 (48 and 6.1)
site 4 from 58 and 6.1 to 55 and 5.2 (55 and 6.1)
site 5 from 51 and 5.6 to 50 and 5.0 (39 and 5.8)
site 6 from 51 and 5.5 to 47 and 5.0 (38 and 5.5)
site 7 I can’t remember to 37 and 4.9 (37 and 5.5)
site 8 I can’t remember to 33 and 4.9 (34 and 5.7)
site 9 from 38 and 4.9 to 36 and 4.3 (new)

As you can see many sites increased from August (gradually over the months) and then gave some of those gains back in the last day or two (or decreased to below August 2014, especially for MozRank). On average since August, 2014 PA increase then gave a bit of the increase back but was higher than August, 2014 while MozRank increased more then gave even more than the gain back to end up lower than August, 2014.

This site isn’t very connected to the others. This blog was 31 Moz Page Authority and 5.0 MozRank in August 2014, today it is MozPA 31 and 4.4 MozRank. The main Multi-pagerank site had MozPA of 41 and MozRank of 4.9 in August, 2014. Now the main site is 40 and 4.9. I think maybe these values didn’t change today but I can’t really remember. For the other sites they pretty much stayed in the same area since August, 2014.

Find MozRank, Moz PageAuthority, Google PageRank and Alexa Results Now

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We have updated the MultiPageRank site to provide MozRank, Moz PageAuthority, Google PageRank and Alexa results now. In one simple request you can retrieve all these measures for multiple domains.

Google provided an opening in the market to serve users interested in page authority/popularity when they slowed sharing the updates to public Google page rank. Moz has filled that role extremely well. For a year or two Moz results have been much more useful than Google’s. We have finally added Moz results to our results page.

MozRank is closest to Google page rank to measure raw link authority to the page; as with Google page rank the link weight is based on the rank of the page providing a link. So 1 link on the home page of some very popular site would provide more rank to the linked page than thousands from low quality pages.

Moz page authority is enhanced with many extra factors to try and provide a better estimation of search result “authority.” Moz calculates it based off data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank, MozTrust, and dozens of other factors.

We also continue to include Alexa data which does have significant issues with reliability but it is of some interest so we include it. Alexa uses their data (largely toolbar user based) to rank websites by total visitors/visits (a combination). There data is biased with SEO sites in particular getting a big boost as users using those sites are often using a toolbar that shares data with Alexa and they visit lots of SEO related sites.

We have had some issues (largely very slow response times for the results page) providing the additional Moz data but I believe things are working well now. Still I have the old results visible using www.multipagerank.com. The new results are found on multipagerank.com. I made split when we first had issues as we worked on them. I will likely eliminate the old results page in the next couple weeks if everything continues to go well.

Related: Use Our Multiple PageRank Site to Find PageRank of https Pages – Is the Value of Links Decreasing? – Keeping Up with SEO Changes

Are the Values of Links Decreasing?

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This interesting articles shows 13 SEO experts opinions on questions such as:

Do you see the link losing value over time?
How – if at all – should SEO’s change their content marketing and link building strategies in the coming years, given inevitable changes to the PageRank algorithm?
If Google search did work without links, what metrics would replace it?

Some interesting quotes:

The Future of PageRank: 13 Experts on the Dwindling Value of the Link

Michelle Robbins: “Google wants their results to be valid and relevant – to mirror user expectations in the real world, and they will continue to evolve their system to get there. Links aren’t doing it, so they are working to adapt. Offline signals are valid, not easily manipulated, and can be captured. Thus I believe they will be used in the algo.”

Julie Joyce: “I think that links could lose some value but it’s not a doomsday scenario in my opinion. Considering links are how we move around on the web I cannot imagine a successful search engine that doesn’t take their importance into effect.”

Rand Fishkin: “the link has been losing value for almost a decade. That said, I don’t think that in the next decade, we’ll see a time when links are completely removed from ranking features. They provide a lot of context and value to search engines, and since the engines keep getting better at removing the influence of non-editorial links, the usefulness of link measurement will remain high.”

Glenn Gabe: “AuthorRank (or some form of it) once it officially rolls out. The model of ranking people versus websites is extremely intriguing. It makes a lot of sense and can tie rankings to authors versus the sites their content is written on.”

One thing I find funny about the article is talking about “social factors” (social websites) as if they were not links. Google currently claims to ignore social links that use the nofollow (and Google policies have driven companies scared of being punished to use nofollow). But Google using “social factors” is just Google using links it has been failing to use the last few years. I agree Google is foolish to be ignoring those indications today. So I agree Google should use more links (social and likely non-social) to provide better results.

I suppose one “social factor” people could mean is the number of likes something gets. I think that would be a lame measure to give any value to. The use of +1s data in Google+ may have some tiny benefit as their Google can know who gave what pluses (and devalue junk plus profiles, give extra value to authority that is plusing related good [using corroboration with other sources of Google has to gage quality] content).

I have long thought using traffic and interaction (comments, time on site…) with the sight are useful measures for Google. Google has various ways for getting this data. I am not sure to what extent they use it now. Not that it would be a huge factor but just another factor to throw in with the huge number they use already.

I agree trusted authorship is likely to play an increasingly important role. Partially this seems like an extension of pagerank to me (basically passing value to the link based on the link to the author – and the authorship stuff right now, is all link based, there has to be a link on the page tying the author to the Google+ page for the author).

Related: Very Simple Process to Claim Authorship of Pages with Google – Why Can’t Search Results Screen Better by Date? – Surprise Google Public PageRank Update – Use Multiple PageRank Site to Find PageRank of https Pages

Surprise Google Public PageRank Update

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Google has published updated public page ranks in a surprise move. Earlier this year Google Guy (Matt Cutts) had said he would be surprised if Google updated the public PageRank data before 2014.

Initial reports seem to be that people are seeing more drops in PageRanks than increases – but that could just be a factor of who is talking the loudest. Also there is more speculation that the data is old. In a quick check of 2 high PageRank blogs of mine the latest posts with PageRank are in August – no September, October, November or December posts have page rank (it may well be within a few days of September 1st in either direction). In past updates the data would often be 2 weeks old, this indicates it may well be over 3 months old (which others are also saying).

The previous update was in February 2012. In the past the updates have been published at about 3 month intervals but with a fair amount of variation.

It is unlikely they will publish new values 4 times in 2014, but we will have to see.

See how your sites have fared in the latest Google PageRank update.

Related: Use Multiple PageRank Site to Find PageRank of https Pages – Google Has Deployed Penguin 2.0 (May 2013)

No More Google Toolbar PageRank Updates This Year

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Google has essentially announced there will not be another toolbar pagerank update in 2013 (the last update was made in February 2013). The toolbar pagerank is the value Google shares with all of us. The real pagerank is updated very frequently, they just don’t publish that value (and as I have posted before I think they may well adjust the public value from the value they really use in calculating search results).

Matt Cutts essentially speaks for Google on this topic (though Google likes to keep things vague and unofficial). Here is a webcast where he touches on the issue a bit.

Related: Use MultiPageRank Site to Find PageRank of https Pages – Google’s Search Results – Should Factors Other Than User Value be Used