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For as much importance as G places on backlinks for SERPS you would think they would do a better job in finding them.
Alltheweb shows all my backlinks and then some I didnt even know I had. How is it that ATW can do this and Google cant?
In the last G update my backlink count went down?! Even as I add more and more every day.
Am I doing something wrong or is this happening to other webmasters as well?
Google only shows a small subset of your backward links, and it updates them on a very delayed schedule. Some claim that they don't show links that are below a PR4, but I have not personally verified.
not true, i have seen sites in backlinks for months which have PR0
not true, i have seen sites in backlinks for months which have PR0
Or, you have been witness to the infamous "broken tool bar."
WBF
Yup, Google only shows PR4+ sites as backlinks. But, when the toolbar was showing an incorrect PR value it appeared to show links below PR4. That was a toolbar related error.
The thing I am yet to be convinced of is that backlinks below PR4 actually do you any real good in terms of PR. I have sites with thousands of external low PR backlinks, none of them show in Google, but I know they exist. But they don't seem to raise the PR of the recipient site at all.
By my math 2,000+ PR2 backlinks should get a site above PR4...but it doesn't. Meanwhile one PR6 link does the job nicely for a different site with no other backlinks.
This doesn't seem like a very Democratic voting system? It seems like Google wants us to pay for high PR links?
Democracy for sale at Google.com;)
Google loves to brag about it's "democratic" system and it's "integrity". They never should have made so much of PR and the toolbar in the first place. Looks like their democracy is suffering from invasion by the "machine" system.
Democracy for sale - ROFLMAO.
People keep saying this and it is still totally wrong. It used to be true but not anymore. Google often shows backlinks less than PR4 now. Get with the program.
>>Google often shows backlinks less than PR4 now.
Seems like it's been that way for a few months now, seeing low PR backlinks is not as uncommon as it once was.
The toolbar seems to be more of a distraction than anything else.
I know the links are there and I'm sure Google knows the links are there. :)
Whether or not they care to admit it doesn't matter to me.
But surely, the value of a backlink from a PR2 page depends on how many other sites that page links to? 2000 backlinks from sites with 100 links on their PR2 page really can't count for much - well, one percent as much as a single outbound link on that page.
And many of us would actually love to see your math in a little more detail, because I thought that the step-size between PR2 and PR4 was still something that was a guesstimate.
And in case all that seems like sour grapes, it really isn't. By way of illustration, I have a backlink from a PR6 page that has 400 other sites on it, and it made not one jot of difference to my site when the backlinks were recalculated recently.
DerekH
my words exactly
By my math 2,000+ PR2 backlinks should get a site above PR4...
No, a PR4 is correct.
Of course, it depends on the number of links on those pages as well as their exact PR. However, in average this leads to a PR4 (for the current values of the damping factor and logarithmic base).
It's been speculated over and over here that Pagerank is logarithmic with a base somewhere around 7.
If that were to be true, and Percentages on average received a link from a site with 50 links on the page and if all were PR2:
He would need 50 links to get a PR2
50*7 = 350 for a PR 3
50*7*7 = 2450 for a PR4.
There's something called a damping factor too (to simulate the fact a user may click the back button instead of a link) which increases the number of links needed a little. If the damping factor was set to 0.85, you would need:
50/0.85=59 links to get a PR2,
50/.85*7/.85=484 for PR3
and 50/.85*7/.85*7/.85 = 3989 links for PR4
Of course the whole thing is speculation, but it's served me pretty well as a yardstick.
