Yay! It’s another toolbar update underway, as I type! “So what. Who cares?”, you may be saying to yourself. I’m not normally an obsessive PageRank Meter watcher, but I have been keeping a closer eye on it lately because a little technical snafu one of our junior developers made to our Netconcepts.com server config temporarily zereod out our score on the meter. But today it’s back! We’re a PR7 yet again. If you’re wondering what happened that we could zero out our PageRank score, here’s the story… One of our programmers had mistakenly copied over a “bad bots” server configuration file (which includes email harvester bots and other such nasties) from a development server to our production server. What he didn’t realize was that file was set to turn away Googlebot as a bad bot because we didn’t want our development sites getting included in Google. This snafu happened a while ago now and it had long since been corrected. It didn’t take long to notice something was amiss because pages started dropping out of Goog’s index. After allowing Googlebot again, within a few days our pages returned to the index and our rankings returned too, but not our PageRank readout from the toolbar server… until now! Note that our PageRank score as reported in the Google Directory has been unaffected. We’ve stayed at the top of our category page. Out of hundreds of web design agencies beginning with the letter N, no one has a higher PageRank than us (listings are in order of PageRank). (I know you’re saying “Ooooh!!” to that! hehe). The reason for the lack of movement: The last Google Directory PageRank update was December 19 last year. (SEOcompany.ca estimated the next GDPR update would be March, but it still hasn’t happened yet.) So clearly PageRank updates to the toolbar server and to the Google Directory don’t happen simultaneously. In fact, Google Directory PR updates generally happen less frequently than Toolbar PR updates, as you can see here. Of course, both are months out-of-date so it’s best not to base your business upon these readouts. “For entertainment purposes only”, as they say. 😉