One of the most interesting PageRank-updates of the last few years has passed, the current numbers are on all servers that serve the Google-Toolbar-PageRank by now – time to take a look at what actually happened.

Winners and losers – just like every PR-update there are numerous winners and losers, though the great majority of sites has kept their PageRank. Three sites (1, 2, 3) have plummeted from their former PR8 to 5 and have thereby pulled a cascade of inferior linked sites down with them. An explanation for this and similar cases should be that some sites, especially those that had a certain proximity to SEO, linkpurchase and -trade, partially went to the dogs in this update – Google's intentions should thereby be achieved. However, we can register a few prominent newcommers (1, 2 both PR7).

PageRank-distribution – about a year ago I already published the distribution of the PageRank of homepages for German domains. Since there are a few interesting PageRank-updates in between, here the current numbers.


There surely are some shifts in the PageRank-pyramid – which is not really a pyramid, truth be hold – but nowhere near the massive dimensions that could be suspected by the the blogecho. After the inflationary increase of PageRank in the system, which was caused by the massive purchase of links of strong sites like the W3C or developer sites through parts of the German Internet during the last update, Google finally took countermeasures and demoted the relations back into standard dimensions.

Remaining PR8-domains in Germany – as mentioned before, the PageRank for most German domains has declined. Of course this also has an effect on those sites on the “Mount Olympus of PageRank”. More than 50 De-domains have lost their PageRank of 8, including prominent websites like heise.de or spiegel.de. Here is a list now of those domains, whose homepages still have a PageRank of eight, forwarded or duplicate websites were filtered out.

A	amazon.de, avh.de
B	bertelsmann.de, bmbf.de, bscw.de
C	campus-germany.de
D	daad.de, debian.de, desy.de, dfg.de
E	emis.de, eracareers-germany.de
F	fau.de, fraunhofer.de, fu-berlin.de, fz-juelich.de
G	gfz-potsdam.de, gi-ev.de, gmd.de, google.de
H	hu-berlin.de, humboldt-foundation.de
M	mpg.de, mysql.de
O	oreilly.de
R	rwth.de
S	spacenet.de
T	tecchannel.de, tu-berlin.de, tu-darmstadt.de, tu-muenchen.de
U	uni-berlin.de, uni-bielefeld.de, uni-erlangen.de, uni-freiburg.de, uni-heidelberg.de, uni-karlsruhe.de, uni-koeln.de, uni-stuttgart.de, uni-tuebingen.de
W	w3c.de, wgl.de

The ranks have been decimated noticeably and of those left, nearly all are academic offers. A few commercial sites are able to draw upon a long life, a large variety of backlinks and a proximity to PageRank-strong developers sites. Nominations for further German PageRank-8-domains are happily accepted through the comments of by e-mail, incidentally Gerald has a list with all PR10-sites on hand.