Sometimes Google makes changes that are announced and other times they make remarkably silent changes. In the case of Google Webmaster Tools, both types of changes have occurred – outdated software alerts and PageRank. The recent changes are a reflection on how the company is constantly striving to keep up with its customers’ needs and desires.
Update alerts
In the case of the former, Google is going to incorporate a service that alerts webmasters of web site software updates and releases when these programs become outdated. The reasoning behind this new service is that many web site owners are unaware of new updates. Not applying them in a timely manner can lead to a hacked web site. In fact, the company started out with merely sending alerts to web site owners of potential security issues and when this was well-received, Google decided to take it a step further.
The alerts are not limited to just software updates. Google has set it so that web site owners will be notified of new modules or plugins belonging to existing programs (such as new Drupal modules or Joomla extensions).
How is Google managing to identify which web sites and programs need to be targeted? The company parses the source code of each and every web page it crawls. Normally, within the source code of these pages one will find software generated meta tags that indicate the program version number. When a version number is lower than the currently updated program version, an alert is sent out to the web site owner. For the moment, update alerts depend upon software creators ensuring their version numbers are listed within the meta tags.
There has not been a specific time set for this newest feature to be rolled out, though Google indicates it will be soon.
PageRank
The other change that Google has made recently to its Webmaster Tool area is that of PageRank. The removal of this particular feature was not announced – just silently passed off. In the past, Google consistently informed web site owners that too much focus was being placed on PageRank when, in reality, it was not considered to be a tremendously valuable metric to follow.
The odd thing is, though PageRank has been removed from the Google Webmaster Tool area, it remains within the Google Toolbar. Apparently it is considered to be too solid of a piece of the branding for Google to have it removed.
Though removed from the tools and left in the toolbar, Google has indicated the PageRank can still be considered useful. It can indicate to the user how the web site is behaving within Google’s index. If “green,” all is well. If any other color, an investigation is warranted.
Google does wish to point its users to an FAQ page dedicated to Google and SEO – this area covers crawling, ranking, and indexing. The fact is, PageRank is one of a couple hundred signals that can affect a web site’s ranking.
Whether silently removed or publicly preannounced, it seems Google is keeping up with its customers’ ongoing web site needs.
November 30th, 2009 at 10:10 am
I don’t know but google changes the algorithms so quickly that sometimes it degrades 2 page ranks.