Last Friday, Matt Cutts (Google’s head of webspam) announced that Google was updating its PageRank (toolbar) over the weekend, and more importantly, some of the older penalties were being dropped.

As with all PageRank updates, site owners are reporting movements up and down as the full update takes effect. Some of the key PageRank measuring tools (e.g. SEOquake) are still not reporting consistent figures.

While PageRank isn’t a definitive guide to Google’s ranking algorithm, it is still viewed as one of the key indicators.

The toolbar update, which tends to occur every 3 to 4 months, is only Google sharing a snapshot of the dynamic PageRank which it uses in its algorithms. As matt points out:

“It’s more accurate to think of it {PageRank] as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.”

Of more interest in the announcement post by Matt Cutts, was the removal of some old penalties. While Matt doesn’t disclose exactly which penalties have been dropped (obviously), some of you might see some unexpected improvements in your results.

Last year saw many sites hit with penalties due to certain link acquisition strategies and a lack of new link acquisition. If you were affected by these, chances are you might get some reprieve from the new update.

Matt has provided some good feedback to commenter’s questions and remarks (over 230 comments at the time of writing this post), so pop over to his post if you want to digest the entire conversation.

If you’ve seen any movements in your PageRank, share your tales with other readers via our comments below.