Google snapshots of backlinks

Does the links you have now take effect much later?

[Rick42]

After reading the thread that had Google Guy answering question after question, I came across one of his posts were he mentions:

"The external backlinks/PR that we show have at least a couple factors that complicate analysis. First off, they are a snapshot in time, and the actual backlinks/PageRank used for ranking are from a different time interval."

Has anybody been able to observe this? On my side, I have done optimization for a site that I saw achieve better rankings by the week, which coincidented with the period that I was building links consistently, and gaining new backlinks on a daily basis.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. Thanks all.

[martinibuster]

This is fairly well known. GG was referring to "internal PR" which is the accurate measure of PR. What's on the toolbar is a snapshot of where PR roughly was on a specific date.

And yes, I have observed rankings improve as links were added to a website. Not just in Google, but in Yahoo and MSN, too.