Thanks to confirmation from a post today by Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Journal I can now state that what we are seeing at StepForth is not an aberration; there is a toolbar PageRank (PR) update happening.

What does this mean for you? Nothing, unless your site’s toolbar PR drops to zero for over a week and you see negative ranking fluctuations; then and only then should you consider your site may be in some hot water. Why wait over a week? PageRank takes time to update so you may see unfavourable data for a short time while things settle out. That said, the PageRank you ultimately see has little or no affect on your search engine rankings anyway because they are based on either older data or reflects just a moment in time of Google’s algorithm. Indeed, as Barry noted, there is reasonable speculation that the PR we see on the toolbar is not the same PR data used in Google’s all important algorithm (even at the point in time the PR was displayed).

There, I talked a lot about something that is supposed to be irrelevant but I figured it was worth sharing these details to qualm any fears over the changes seen this week.