PageRank November 2011 update: Facebook’s rank downgraded to 9
Google generally updates the PageRank index either quarterly or once in two months. 8th November 2011 witnessed another PageRank update. The highlight of the update was that Facebook’s PageRank was downgraded to 9 from 10. There may be many reasons for this downgrade. Now Google indexes the comments on Facebook also. It might be one of the reasons for the drop in rank. Another possible reason for the drop in Facebook’s PageRank could be the increasing number of spam posts and shares. Facebook.com’s PageRank was upgraded to the highest possible PageRank of 10 on 2nd April 2010. Facebook managed to occupy the highest rank for 585 days. Another interesting point is that Google.com which is ranked No: 1 by Alexa in terms of traffic, also has a PageRank of 9. On 27th June 2011, Google downgraded its own rank to 9. Prior to June 2011 update, Google.com had a PageRank of 10. Most of the regional Google sites also suffered drop in their PageRank after June 2011 PageRank update.
List of PageRank 10 webpages (After November 2011 update)
| Title | URL |
|---|---|
| US Goverment website | http://www.usa.gov/ |
| Adobe – Adobe Reader Download | http://get.adobe.com/reader/ |
| Adobe – Adobe Flash Player Download | http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ |
| United States Department of Health and Human Services | http://www.hhs.gov/ |
| Miibeian | http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/ |
| Social Bookmarking Sharing Button Widget | http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php |
| Europeana | http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ |
| EUA – European University Association | http://www.eua.be/ |
| Universitas 21 | http://www.universitas21.com/ |
NB: The list may not be complete. If you find a PageRank 10 webpage, please comment on the post so that I can add the link to the list.
What is PageRank?
Google’s official statement about PageRank technology:
“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”
Please note that Google had removed this official definition from their website. Earlier they had this definition in their technology overview page.
PageRank is a score that ranges from 0 to 10. The most popular websites have a PageRank of 10. The least have a PageRank of 0. Another point to note is that PageRank is not for a website. But it is for a webpage. If there are 100 webpages in a website, then all the 100 pages will be ranked separately. That is, www.xyz.com and www.xyz.com/abc/ may have different ranks.
Many webmasters think that PageRank is the only criteria used to determine a webpage’s position in Google search results. But in reality, Google considers about 200 factors to determine the position of a webpage’s position. PageRank is just one of them. This is clear from the above fact that Google.com and Facebook.com which occupies the first and second spot in terms of traffic has PageRank of 9, while many other sites which are less popular has a PageRank of 10.
adobe.com has actually a pagerank of 0 since the last update in november..what is the reason for this?
google is the king …
This is interesting… i guess page ranking depends largly on backlinks and it does have huge number of backlinks…. Why the downgrade then.?
You can Read about Page ranking here: http://blogging.newsandfunn.com/how-to-increase-the-page-rank-of-a-website/