It appears as if Google is once again updating the pagerank of websites at its datacenters. This site, for instance, jumped from a PR1 to a PR2, and other sites have increased in pagerank as well.

Does this mean an increase in your rankings if your PR went up? Simply put, no. However, it does mean that it will be much easier for you to find link partners and complete link exchanges, which does affect your position in the search engines.

Many sites are already discussing the first update of the new year including Matt Cutt’s blog at this post, whom in case you didn’t know is the official spokesperson and public relations guru at Google. He also went on to note in his blog post that, “…going forward, you’ll continue to see the supplemental results get even fresher, and website owners may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages.” This was a previous filter that many SEO experts had suspected Google might have recently introduced, but it has now been made official thanks to Matt. We shall continue to see how this affects rankings for blogs and fresh content in there algorithm.

Other forum threads and sites discussing the pagerank update for your convenience:

Web Master World

Digital Point Forums - Thread 1

Digital Point Forums - Thread 2

A few things I noticed about the pagerank update:

• fewer sites seem to be increasing in pagerank in this and other recent updates
• sites with a majority of paid links seem to have increased in PR very little (if any)

We will have to see how the rest of the websites perform in this update, but for now its just a waiting game until the pagerank update is officially finished.