Google index and PR (Page Rank)

I am going to go out on a limb.

After much debate and discussion in the office I have come up with a hypothesis on googles index updates and PR updates.

Many of you would have seen your sites lisings change in the last few weeks on your key keywords. Some good changes and some not so good probably, keep those meta tags up to date and change them to be current with your content.

These changes happen when google (and other search engines) decide to rollout their new index of sites/pages they have found while spidering the internet.
This is normally done every few months to keep the results they show you when you do a search up to date and 'real'.
They all have secret algorithms they use to generate this list and these are tweaked to adapt to to the way the web is used/searched etc.

The last update seemed to take a long time, actually we have seen pages from some of our sites move up and down the search lists continuously for the last month or so. Some on a daily basis.

So I am guessing that the index changes are going to continue all the time and the days of big index updates may be a thing of the past.
As an SEO person this is good and bad. Good it makes it harder for 'black hat' search engine companies to achieve faked/forced ranking, Bad I have to work harder and more efficiantly to amke sure all of your sites are stabile.

Remember there is no 100% guaruntee with search engine listings, they can go down as well as up, with these changes it just menas the time they stay where they are is not set in stone anymore, a year or so ago you could have said it would stay put for a month maybe 2 in the same palce, now well, its like watching the tide come in and go out over a piecec of driftwood.

I could be completely wrong, it may just be a really big update and algorithm change, I cant be sure.

Check it yourself, this is a good idea to do anyway irrespective of this scenario, open a spreadsheet, add a column with your keywords in it and a nother with todays date. Do a search in google (or any other search engine), count how many sites are listed before your and chuck that number in the corresponding cell.
Next week do the same, and so on and so on.

Please leave any results here (or email me) as I am really keen to see what the results will be.

goodluck with the SEO results