Boredworkers.com

Google is in the midst of updating its PR index, and it scared the shit out of me. While checking the main page of Boredworkers.com, I found that the PR in Google toolbar showing a big fat ZERO (0)!

I went like “Oh my…”. And the worse part was that I was actually showing the page to my brother-in-law. Imagine the embarassment if this really was the new PR that Google is assigning to the site. What’s more, I was just talking about PR, the prospect of pushing Boredworkers.com’s PR through to 6, studying up on the methods, and making some changes in my efforts to achieve this goal. Seeing a ZERO in the PR meter, I panicked… sort of.

So I checked against two other services just to make sure. The first one was using inseeker.com’s pagerank script. By providing it a url as an argument (e.g. url=www.boredworkers.com), it will ping one of Google’s numerous servers and display the returned pagerank. The result caused me to panic even more…

As a last resort, I pointed my browser to SEOChat to see what their future pagerank tool had to say… A scream would have escaped my mouth if I was the type for screaming as I saw a BIG FAT ZERO on one of the servers!

After calming down for a bit, I got to thinking. Google is just updating its pagerank index. It just so happens that they were in the middle of one of their iterations for recalculating Boredworkers.com’s PR on one of their servers. It was merely coincidence that both the Google toolbar PR queried “toolbarqueries.google.com” as it was updating its PR values and inseeker.com queried another server which was also calculating the PR. And a further coincidence that SEOChat caught one of the servers with its pants down as it was calculating the new PR. A chain of coincidences nearly gave me a heart attack.

So once again, if you suddenly see your pagerank showing up as ZERO, don’t panic. Google is updating its PR index. Wait until the values have been finalised. If it is still showing zero, then you may start to panic…