This is just a quick post today, I’ll be carrying on with the Beginner’s Guide to SEO for WordPress later this week.  This is just one of those impromptu posts that interrupts our regularly scheduled broadcast, like a Breaking News Flash in blog form.

If you pay any attention to such things, you can’t have failed to notice that there’s been a lot of talk in SEO circles today about the latest round of updates from Google to the PageRank that it displays in the Google Toolbar.

Most, if not all, serious SEOs will tell you that this little green bar is basically meaningless; displaying an overly simplified (and occasionally manipulated) approximation of the actual Internal PageRank value that the Big G uses as part of its calculations to determine a page’s placement within the SERPs.
As Matt McGee points out,

much like WWE Wrestling and the sports betting lines published in your daily paper, Toolbar PageRank exists for entertainment purposes only.

So, we all know that TPR doesn’t reallymean anything significant, but that won’t stop thousands, or even millions, of webmasters the world over rushing to check out their sites today to see what Google is saying about them.

And I’m almost ashamed to admit that I’m one of them.
I know I shouldn’t take any notice of it.
I know I ought to be more interested in reviewing “proper” metrics like inbound links, pageviews and SERP rankings.
I know it really doesn’t matter.

But that didn’t stop me from getting a little tingle of excitement when I got home from work and noticed that when I went to my site, the little bar that had been plain old grey earlier this afternoon now had a teeny tiny little bit of green in it.

Sure, Google only wants to give me 1/10, but considering the fact that this site hasn’t quite reached its two month-iversary yet, that still feels like a minor achievement.  It’s not much, but it’s a start and it makes me feel like things are moving in the right direction.  Now I just have to keep going.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.
And I promise I won’t mention Toolbar PageRank again.  At least not until the next update