Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Well the PageRank update appears to be well underway with many already noticing the new numbers in their toolbars. After doing some surfing for website affected by the update we found that the biggest hit was one that gave us quite the chuckle.

The MSN website (MSN.com) took the biggest hit and is now a PR2. That's right, MSN.com with it's over 1.4 million backlinks (on MSN.com that is - Google only shows them with 8) somehow has only earned a PR2 which leaves me with 2 questions:

1. Is Google purposly deflating the MSN site rankings, or
2. Is the a ghost in the machine at Google?

Of the two choices I lean towards the ghost theory. While I'm sure the folks at Google would love to see MSN drop off the face of the Earth, I find it unlikely that they would make such a blatantly obvious adjustment to their algorithm just to do it. Oh, I'm not saying someone there wouldn't be tempted, but to do so would undermine the entire "democracy" of their rankings.

If I had to hazard a guess I'd say that they way they are currently calculating backlinks is flawed (how obvious a statement is that?). Overall the update seems to be fairly decent (though we still haven't had time to analyze all the changes) but clearly something's gone awry. I would expect that this will be remedied in the near future but until then it's good for a chuckle.