While browsing the SERPS the other day, I noticed this blog showed a PR0 in the toolbar, out of nowhere! It has been a PR3 for at least 10 months and I am not sure what is up!

Spoke with some other webmasters who also had loses of PR in the last few days. I do not think this is a general PR update, but either a glitch or they are penalizing me for something, like selling links, which is funny because I have never sold a link in my life!

I really could care less about PR since the site still ranks Page 1 for it’s main keywords and for many inner pages and that is all that really matters, as it should be since I think I provide enough useful content and therefore have been lucky enough to get lots of natural links to this blog. But it is curious.

The SERPS are still wacked as I discussed in May-June SERPS shakeups and some of my sites are bouncing around page 5-7 on an almost hourly basis.

There is definitely an update or some tweaking going on with Google, that will hopefully end this month. Though veteran webmasters that I have talked with say that they have seen similar activity in the past and it could last thru the summer.

Interesting SERP Observations from other Webmasters:

• Many are reporting being hit for specific search terms and not sitewide. So while inner pages maintain ranking, home pages are being hit with a -50 in SERPS for certain keywords. And this is what I see as well.
• Lots of spam sites
• Irrelevant pages
• Previously penalized sites returning from penalties
• Many are using Bing, because Google’s results have been wacked

For the keywords I watch:

• Very few home pages on page 1, mostly inner pages
• ONLY aged sites, 3+ years and most 5+ years old
• The big guns are there (sometimes)
• Some domains that were bought aged and then crappy links added to them
• Old stale articles from Buzzle for buy keywords (which is lame)
• Page 1-3 results in keyword searches that are NOT in the title of the website

Time Will Tell

I personally think that links are being devalued and especially older links that are of low quality.

But, no one ever really knows what is going on with Google, as intended, all we could do is ensure that we have good content and quality links, everything else is a crap shoot and we’ll have to wait and see.

I can picture some geek engineers at Google sitting at THE BUTTON in some office and laughing their asses off reading posts like this as they send our sites to Google hell — hey you gotta laugh at times like these!

Anybody else having issues with SERPS or notice any PR changes in the toolbar?