Google might be telling people to ignore Pagerank that shows up in the Google toolbar (see Google is Finally Killing PageRank); but given the changes I’ve seen on Webmetricsguru.com since my site went from a PR3 to a PR5 a few weeks ago, suggests Pagerank has some life left in it.   A few pictures tells it all.

According to Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

But …. my traffic from search engines has roughly tripled since March 25th.  Google April 2010 PageRank Update seems to be what took place, except it happened a week or so earlier.

The only thing that changed is my pagerank – which I think should never have been affected as it was in the first place.

As long time readers might recall, when my blog was part of Know More Media (now defunct) I was able to achieve, at times, up to 20,000 visits a week to webmetricsguru.com (at times I’d get 500 visits from Google in an hour).  Once Google penalized the entire KMM network (about 80 blogs) my traffic dropped down to about 10% of what it was – and pagerank went from a PR7 to a PR3 and stayed the same for almost 2 years, even though I had nothing to do with some practices the KMM blog network was involved in.   I tried to get things restored, without much luck and finally gave up trying.

So whatever people are saying (including me, that Pagerank doesn’t matter anymore – that’s not exactly correct – it still does).  However, I noticed that Google Pagerank only affects Google traffic – it appears to do nothing for any other search engine to affect traffic coming to your site.

I had a good day at the GooglePlex NYC Headquarters yesterday during Google Campus@SEMPO. The non-disclosure form everyone visiting Google Headquarters  is required to sign prevents me from saying anything about new products  that haven’t been released.

But what impressed me the most were products already been released like Google WonderWheel and Google Insights for Search that I didn’t know about or get a chance to play with as best as I could.

Using the WonderWheel I looked for associations around Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp that I’m speaking at in London on March 31st.

Overall, a lady I spoke with who works for Google and is in a position to know about this stuff – said  the results of the WonderWheel have improved since it was first introduced almost a year ago.  Google releases so many new additions that it’s easy to miss some of them.

Late November Google released Image Swirl which searches images differently – again, I didn’t even know this existed and easily missed it’s introduction.  According to the Official Google Research Blog..

As the Web becomes more “visual,” it is important for Google to go beyond traditional text and hyperlink analysis to unlock the information stored in the image pixels. If our search algorithms can understand the content of images and organize search results accordingly, we can provide users with a more engaging and useful image-search experience.

Google Image Swirl represents a concrete step towards reaching that goal. It looks at the pixel values of the top search results and organizes and presents them in visually distinctive groups. For example, in ambiguous queries such as “jaguar,” Image Swirl separates the top search results into categories such as jaguar the animal and jaguar the brand of car. The top-level groups are further divided into collections of subgroups, allowing users to explore a broad set of visual concepts associated with the query, such as the front view of a Jaguar car or Eiffel Tower at night or from a distance. This is a distinct departure from the way images are ranked by the Google Similar Images, which excels at finding images very visually similar to the query image.

Google Image Swirl is the visual counterpart to Google WonderWheel.

Not sure if I get much out of the image search yet but I definitely liked Wonderwheel.

I’m going to be at Google Campus today

It’s always nice to see what Google is cooking up – my guess is it will be more advertising based.