PageRank of Google India drops from 8 to 7

I read on a blog the other day that Google India (www.google.co.in) had gone from a Page Rank 8 to a Page Rank 7. I couldn’t really find any logical explanation for such a sudden drop especially coming from a Google site!

Just to refresh your memory, the Page Rank (PR) was developed by Larry Page and later Sergey Brin to be one of the main methods used by Google to determine a page’s relevance and importance. You can easily find your PR by downloading the Google Toolbar or by using one of the SEO tools in our website.

After reading that post I wondered if Google UK had the same PR as Google France or Google Spain!

Well surprisingly, I found that the PR of the country specific Google websites is different:

Google.com has a PR of 10.
Google Japan has a PR of 9.
Google Brazil has a PR of 9.
Google UK has a PR of 8.
Google France has a PR of 8.
Google China has a PR of 8.
Google Canada has a PR of 8.
Google Spain has a PR of 7.
Google Ireland has a PR of 7.
Google India has a PR of 7.

As you can see Google.com has the highest PR of 10. No surprise here! But while Google Brazil and Japan’s PR is 9, Google UK and China’s PR is 8…Even more surprising, Google Spain and Google Ireland are on the same level as Google India.

As usual with SEO, no one will agree on why there is such a difference.
Some would say it is about the number of back links (also called inbound links) that each site has but you would expect Google China or Google India to have much more back links than Google Brazil or Google Japan simply because of their population.

All I know is that we’ve got a nice PR 5 on our site, but most important, we’ve got some great positions on Google that, thanks to the Link Building we’ve done and the optimised content in our site, get us a lot of traffic!