PR different based on search terms

same url, different PR

[blonde]

i have recently built a new site and PR=4 for the home page

within past 2 days if i search on google with one search term, click the link and go to the home page the PR is still 4 (same as past month or so since page launched)

if i search on google under different search term, i am on 2nd page, but when i click the link which goes to the same home page, the PR shows gray bar

both searches point to same url www.myname.com
is this normal?

i am new to this, so i read more than participate, but this situation confused me as i thought PR was for a site/page, not related to the search terms

any clarification will be appreciated :)

[kaled]

That's a new one on me. You may find an answer in the Google Toolbar forum.

However, be aware that the PR as reported by the toolbar is not 100% reliable at the moment.

Kaled.

[WebMistress]

Blonde, I can confirm the exact same thing is happening for my site also. It is not normal, but more likely something to do with this irregular update. My homepage also is grey for some terms, but PR6 (it's PR since index in February) on other search terms. It may also have to do with the fact that our sites are not completely indexed in the new index (because of Feb index date). I recently changed my title (this week) just to watch for the new title to know if freshie or old index data was displayed for my site or not. I now see the new title already. Also, for some keywords, I still see internal pages coming up first where my homepage used to come up.

[WebMistress]

Also, I see both my old title and my new title homepage depending on the search terms. When it is the new title, it is grey bar. When it is the old title, it is PR6. By the way, the title has the same keywords in it, just in a different order, for experimental's sake. This shouldn't change how I come up too much, and I certainly don't understand the grey bar, other than displaying the new title within a couple of days of changing it is obviously freshbot.

[WebMistress]

Also, after reading some toolbar differences for www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com, I should point out that the different PR's for my homepage are both www.mydomain.com, in case anyone else checks to see if they are seeing the same thing.

[jdMorgan]

It is likely you are not seeing different PR based on search query, but rather different PR from different datacenters.

There is a "sort of" fix for this. By declaring which datacenter you want the toolbar to use, you can force the PR to settle down. But this is reminiscent of the old aphorism, "Never go to sea with two clocks, take only one, or three." If you have three clocks, and one goes wrong, toss two of the clocks overboard - one bad and one good. Otherwise if one of your two remaining good clocks goes bad, you won't know which one, so it's better to have only one and stick with it. This comes from the old days of reckoning longitude by using clocks and transits... I hope you can see the point.

If you are on a Windows box, find your hosts file - Usually under c:\Windows\hosts
There is no file extension for the hosts file. It is often accompanied by another file, hosts.sam, which is a sample file, and you can try searching for that one if you can't spot your hosts file immediately.

Open your hosts file, and add the following line down near the bottom:

216.239.33.100 toolbarqueries.google.com

This will force the toolbar to always use the same server to get PR data. You will no longer see it jumping around, but you'll never know if you are seeing the "right" PR, either.

I suggest you set the permissions on hosts to read-only when finished modifying it - A common scumware exploit is to add bogus hosts entries for popular web destinations (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.) and the effect is to redirect you to their sites and serve you junk, or to add their junk pop-ups to reputable sites. In most out-of-the-box systems, hosts contains only comment lines or the single entry:

127.0.0.1  localhost

All others are suspect.

HTH,
Jim