Google and Webmasters

So there’s been a slight preview of the PageRank toolbar export on a few of the 216.239.51.* data centers today and unsurprisingly, it didn’t last very long.

The usual discussion forum buzz and jubilation was evident at DigitalPoint and included the usual comments regarding the brief glimpse of the updated values.

Pixel envy is still rampant, and there’s quite a bit of disappointment being expressed over the lack of a visual display in relation to the link development efforts of some.

Others are already trying to cash in on the glimpse and are advertising link sales based on this glimpse or glitch, whichever you’d like to call it.

Always being curious about the future I’ve been pondering Google’s efforts to make it much more difficult for webmasters attempting to reverse engineer the algo, manipulate PageRank and the SERPs.

I’m guessing that in the future, Google will make a few changes to how certain information is presented, such as the toolbar PageRank display, search results for commands used by a small minority (webmasters) in an effort to reduce spam.

What I’m guessing we’ll soon see:

A variation in Toolbar PageRank values across data centers. It will be more difficult to acertain the most recent PageRank toolbar values if there are various values presented simultaneously. Rather difficult to broker links based on PageRank when values aren’t consistent.

A limitation on the total results displayed for advanced search operators such as link:yoursite.com. I’ll go one further and suggest that Google will limit the number of results for advanced search operators to 1000, regardless of the actual number of results. Expect to see Results 1- 10 of about 1000 linking to yoursite.com in the blue status bar regardless of the actual total sometime in the near future. 😉