Drop In PageRank
It has long been assumed that your server IP address was taken into account by Google when establishing PageRank (PR). The theory being that the broader the spread of back-links from sites with different server IP addresses, the more genuine the recipient site.
After all, if it was simply just a matter of the sheer quantity of back-links, a webmaster could easily set up hundreds of satellite sites all on the same server and link them all back to a main site, artificially increasing its PageRank.
However, until we concluded our own trails we couldn’t be sure just how important it was.
We took our own website (PR5) that was hosted on its own dedicated server and whose back-links were predominantly from our own client base and we moved it to our client server so all sites sat on the same server IP address. As a control we also placed a second website (PR3) on the same client server. However the back-links to the PR3 site were largely Internet wide and not from sites on the client server.
No other factors were altered.
After 2 months the control site with a PR3 remained at PR3. However the site with PR5 had dropped to PR3. Whilst a 1 point drop was perhaps to be expected from the Sep/Oct 2008 PR update we should not have seen a 2 point drop.
This indicates to us that when back-links originate from the same server as the recipient site those back-links are severely diluted and the PageRank value is significantly reduced.
If we are correct we should see our test sites’ PR3 increase in the the next PageRank update expected around March 2009.
Watch this space!
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Tags: Drop In PageRank, Google Page Rank, PageRank