This may be bad news for many webmasters around the world. Google has recently changed the way page rank flows from one page to another.

Lets take an example. If you have a page rank 8 webpage and link it to 8 other websites, then according to simple pagerank flow rule – all the 8 linked websites will get a page rank of 1 (8/8 = 1).

Suppose you did not want your pagerank to flow to 4 of these websites you could easily do a rel=”nofollow” and phew, the search engines will make sure the page rank would NOT follow to these sites.

So what about the page rank to other 4 sites? Well they would obviously get a page rank of 2 (8/4 = 2).

Now for some strange reason Google has changed this rule.

So whats the new rule?

The new rule is that page rank will flow to the 4 website without nofollow but they will only get a page rank of 1 INSTEAD of 2.

The leftover page rank of 4 (8-4) will get WASTED.

Watch this video here, where Matt Cutts of Google explained this new behavior.

It is not a simple change as you may think. Page rank is a major factor in determining SERPs (search engine results pages), and this change will dramatically affect the way Google ranks the websites.

One major example are the blogs. All the comments are nofollowed. Before if the author linked to one or two websites, they would easily get a fine portion of the page rank of the page. Now this will be divided among ALL the links (including the comments) and then page rank will flow only to the ones without No Follow. Common sense says the page rank of these pages will get reduced.

Do you like this move by Google? Please leave your comments below.

There is a discussion going on in WebMasterWorld.com that some sites are seeing a drop in their page rank (PR).

I am seeing this too across many websites. Nobody knows whats going on inside Google, but something is surely happening.

Luckily my websites have not lost their page ranks

Let me remind you what Matt Cutts of Google once wrote in his blog that in reality Google maintains two page ranks. One that we see in the toolbar and the other a real floating-point number that Google keeps for internal search ranking.

Heres what he said:

It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.

If you are seeing Google page rank drop in any of your websites, don’t panic. There can be a lot of reasons.

One  – Some engineers in Google are doing (read testing) something, so the “virtual” page rank that you see has lost its green bar. What I mean is it can be temporary.

Two – If the site has not lost its rankings why panic in the first place? Afterall your visitors don’t see page rank and buy stuff from you.

Three – The page rank drop can be a software glitch in Google.

Four – Check your internet connection. Sometimes the internet speed is so slow that page rank doesn’t seem to download for ages. Refresh the page; you might see the page rank. If in doubt you can even visit an internet café / friend’s house / or check in any other computer to confirm the page rank drop.

Five – (very rare) Your Google Toolbar got corrupted. Download the latest version here and install.

Bottom line – DON’T do anything silly to increase page rank if you see a sudden drop. Since page rank is Google’s property and you don’t have any control over it, its better to create and keep building a good site, your page rank will improve with time.