Today we see the first Pagerank update of the year, with many not having seen another PR update since April 2010. However, what has happened for the last 2 years, Google have been doing Pagerank updates in the first half of the year then they have used the second half of the year to introduce new features and this year we have seen a number of new products focused on reviews and Google Places, with Hotpot and Place reviews being included into the main results.

This is no doubt a causative factor of the Pagerank updates not taking place in the second part of the year, likewise last year the anticipated Google Caffeine infrastructure change had clearly taken its toll on the Googleplex who had no updates from June through to November.

However, in normal times, Google generally do minor updates monthly, these are such tiny shifts that most people do not seem to notice, they are rolled out along side new index updates, so we often see new pages being indexed at the same time that the Pagerank update takes place. Though its normally only an internally visible or visible on sites which are new or where there were fixes on pages which were lacking PR on prior rounds.

There is still a healthy obsession over Pagerank updates across the board among the SEO community with many using it as a guide to see how well they have faired with their natural link building techniques over the last few months. However the fixation many have over PR updates is a little obsessive while instead we should all pretty much ignore this as a valuation measure. After-all ranks are what count and bring in the business and it is these which should be the number one focus of anyone who in interested in search and running a business based on the natural traffic flows coming from Google!