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Quite a few things changed with the Google update over the last 6 months.
I can see that new pages added to my sites are being added rather quickly to the Google search index.
My question is related on how Google ranks a new page.
Does Google do an on-the-fly ranking of new pages?
Or does Google give new pages a quick & dirty new ranking and does an reevaluation at a later stage (with a backlink update)?
Thanks for your help.
Klaus
PS: And also a big thank you for all the very valuable discussions here at WW ;-)
[edited by: webtrends at 2:06 pm (utc) on Sep. 17, 2003]
The initial PR Google assigns to a page is always modified whenever new incoming links to that page are discovered, so the PR is not really a constant, it's more like an on-going process.
The higher that PR gets, however, the more it resembles a constant, as the PR scale is logaritmic, so it gets increasingly difficult to get to new levels the higher you are.
As for brand-new pages: These can be indexed and even top-ranking in some cases before they ever get any PR (as shown in the Toolbar).
/claus
I think the above was perhaps not quite clear. When new pages are top-ranking, they are among the top search results although they have no (Toolbar) PR. The results pages can have other pages that have higher PR-ranking than the new pages, but Google finds them less relevant, so they are displayed lower.
The SERP-ranking (results) and the PR-ranking (Toolbar) is not always the same, that is.
Your question: "if Google assigns an on-the-fly initial" rank; i don't know, and don't really think so. I think that new pages are valued mostly on on-page factors.
I also think that Google will do an initial on-page rating and then later on add page rank to the new page.
On the other hand, Google might find the new page through a page with pagerank. So it could very well be that Google just temporarily assigns that pagerank - 1 to the new page. Later on it can recalc the new page's pagerank (in a global pr recalculation process).
It would make the process of optimizing a new page easier if one would really understand the process, due to the fact that there is no real Google Dance anymore.
