101 Links on a page.

Can Google possibly be this instantaneous?

[HeyJim]

A lady in our office was listing links to some sites she's going to be contacting for a possible link exchange. She wasn't content with a round number like 100 and decided to go for 101. Immediately after entering external link number 101 the toolbar PR on the page dropped by 1 point! She called my attention to it, we removed one link, and PR went back up one point.
The page must be dead on the specific PR for such a tiny thing to show on the toolbar but what amazes me is to see any drop at all. Especially instantaneously. We added the link in and out a couple of times so it was hardly a one time coincidence.
This may be old news to many but it's the first hint I had of a PR drop from having too many links on a page.
Or, is this something new?

[MonkeeSage]

Since the toolbar PR is displayed by a logarithmic scale, it can be very misleading. You never know if there was a big or small drop in actual PR between the boundries cause you can't see the real PR number, just the log'd representation.

You page may have been 0.79383897388973 as it's actual PR, but you see PR3 (these numbers are totally made up, just a head's up), then you go to 0.79383897388974 but that just happens to be where the log scale converges to the next number so you then see PR4; or you may have 0.79483897388973 but still not hit the convergence and still show PR3, even though you are now a much higher 3 than before.

Jordan

[Mohamed_E]

There is no evidence that Google recalculates PR on the fly. We know that the toolbar PR is currently "unstable", probably intentionally so to confuse optimizers.

Putting those two things together I have absolutely no doubt that you observed a (strange) pattern of random variations. If you were confused I am sure that Google is quietly chuckling "mission accomplished".

[trillianjedi]

I'm with Mohammed.

Google index over 3 billion pages. Updating on the fly like that is just not possible with current technology (even with the amount of PC clusters they have).

I don't think google are triying to deliberately confuse SEO's though - I think it more likely that they are continuing to tweak the algo, and the toolbar will be the last thing to be updated to fit in with whatever new algo they finally land on.

TJ

[killroy]

It'd be vital to observe your logs to see if the page does get respidered.

Also try disabling th toolbar, making the cahnge and re-enabling it.

Do a bit more detailed testing, and most likely you will find it was a fluke.

SN

[nakulgoyal]

There might be some issue with teh Google Toolbar or some problem at your end. Absolutely impossible that this can happen on runtime.

[BlueSky]

I have had something similar to what you experienced happen a few times. The first time I noticed it, which happens to be the most dramatic change, was when I was adding alt and title tags to images one day. Right in the middle of editing I had to go do something. When I came back I forget that I had to still change the text in them, so I mistakenly posted the page with all of them being the same. The page's PR in the toolbar immediately dropped from a five to a grey bar. I was shocked and quickly checked my other pages to see if my site might have gotten blacklisted. They all were still okay. Then, I ran the cursor over the images and saw what I stupidly had done. After fixing the img tags and reposting the page, the PR went immediately back to a 5. Since I was pretty intrigued about how it changed so fast, I also flipped back and forth between the good and the bad copy. Each time the PR would go from 5 to grey and back.

The other times it only dropped down one. In each case, there was a mistake which after fixing it would then return. I also had the reverse happen where I added content, and the PR immediately went up. In all these times, Googlebot was on the site but not indexing the particular page or the section I was working on.

I don't know if it's updating on the fly or just a big coincidence, but that toolbar has me trained to look at it after editing any page.

[MonkeeSage]

I think it would be statistically impossible for Google to update PR in realtime since it's based on a distribution across the whole database of indexed sites...however...they could have easily added a content filter to the toolbar itself so that it calulates a PR offset in realtime as it views a page, and then detracts the offset from the value from the PR file sent from their server...

Just a bit of speculation.

Jordan

[2_much]

Adding a link shouldn't change the PR of the page since that's based on inbound links.

Also, I never use PR to determine anything, I rely on traffic.