Did Google change the dampening factor?

[SlyOldDog]

I don't have any emprical evidence. It's just a feeling I get when I look around at the moment.

Sites seem to be passing on less Pagerank since the update. I have found a few PR7s linking to PR5s for example, with only a few links on the source page.

Backlinks seem to have dropped too. This might result from a general lack of pagerank being passed around.

Could Google have tweaked the damping factor? Googleguy intimated something was up with Pagerank in his pre-update announcement.

[jimbeetle]

Don't know how us poor schubs could ever really know.

If more pages indexed equates to smaller slices of the PR pie that can be passed around then those PR 7 pages moving from high- to mid- or low-7 PR with whatever the logarithmic scale is might explain some of what's being seen.

[ciml]

The Toolbar seems to react to link structures in the same way. If there were significant changes to the rank source (damping factor), they ought to be should be measurable IMO.

I think that jimbeetle's idea makes sense. As Google index deeper (especially 'dynamic' looking URLs), PageRank distribution may make sense.

Also, as the Web matures the difference between well linked sites and poorly linked sites is likely to increase. The bigger the pond, the greater the range of fish sized expected.

I'm not a biologist, I mean fish and pond only in the context of site and Web.

[Brian]

This is my impression also. My numbers of backlinks has dropped sharply and my lower-level pages have mostly dropped PR. Hasn't made any difference to my rankings on keywords. I think they've turned the volume down on PR a little.

[doc_z]

I have seen the same: a site drops from PR6 to PR5 although there is still a backlink from a PR7 site with only a few links on it (and the numberof links has not changed).

The effect of changing the dampening factor is very complicated to estimate since the whole scale will change, e.g. the maximum PR (one of the two points which fix the whole Toolbar PR scale) decreases. A general rule would be that a large number of links gets more important while a single link from a high ranking site gets less important. However, I would expect to see more drastical changes if the damping factor was increased significantly.

As mentioned before, a change in the Tollbar PR can be caused by
- a decrease of the PR of some pages linking to the site
- a decrease of transferred PR through additional links on pages with backlinks to the site
- a change in the PR algorithm
- a change in the Toolbar scale (The Toolbar PR is the relation to the most important page. Therefore, a change of the PR of this page - caused by additional links to this page - can lead to a drop of the Toolbar PR)

(I am still trying to find out if Google has modified the algorithm in such a way that not all links on a site get the same weight. But I will get no results before the next update.)

[JayC]

GoogleGuy's comments in this thread [webmasterworld.com] imply that at least some of any decrease in indicated PageRanks and the number of reported backlinks may be due to the changed "handling" of expired domains. Among those comments:

Mainly I wanted to mention expired domains to explain why people might see some differences in PR and the number of reported backlinks this month.

Of course, that doesn't mean the dampening factor couldn't have changed as well...

[figment88]

Also, there is no reason that the dampening factor has to be the same across all pages. IIWG (if I were Google), I'd have a dampening factor that escalated with PR on the first iteration.

[mfishy]

I feel pretty strongly that Google has, indeed, changed the dampening factor. My guess is that they do this to prevent the buying of high PR links.

[Marcia]

I've seen a PR drop with no change in number of backlinks and no appreciable change to the linking sites either, those pretty much stayed the same.

[Jane_Doe]

I have one site where many of the pages dropped in Page Rank. The pages mostly stayed the same or went up in the SERPs and the traffic for the site went up by a third with this last update, so I can't complain.

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but I noticed when I checked my rankings after this recent Google update that the PR for a number of category pages in the Google directory dropped appreciably. One that used to be a PR7 is now a PR4. One that was a PR5 for a long time is now a 3, one that was a 6 is now a 4, and so on.