There are lots of webmasters who always keep their eye on the Google Toolbar to check the pagerank of their website and I have seen that Google is updating the Toolbar pagerank very frequently. In fact the real pagerank is calculated every time, but the toolbar is updated usually once in 2-3 months or sometimes after 4 months.
But recently there were some updates done very frequently. November 2008 pagerank update was really not noticed on majority of websites, but I can confirm that as some of my pages got new PR. Earlier, we could really tell that the PR update will be around so and so date, but now lots of things have been changed with Google Pagerank. Google penalizes websites for paid links, paid reviews. The algorithm of Pagerank has been changed, the standard of Pagerank has been changed now.
Now the question is do you have to bother about pagerank and if you, how do you gain pagerank and what are the advantages of having a better pagerank.
Gone are the days when you do some link trading or get some reciprocal links or get some backlinks by blackhat SEO tricks. In my opinion, just concentrate of creating good content for your readers, follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If you have good content, you will get back links from related websites and you will finally have a better pagerank. If you have a better pagerank, you will get a position in the Google SERPs and finally tons of traffic. If you are planning to get better pagerank to sell text links and make money, then it will not work. Google is intelligent enough to get hold of websites where links are sold and they are penalizing the websites. So for a long run, if you are expecting good traffic from Google, forget about these tricks and concentrate of good and unique contents.
