PageRank oscillating!

pagerank pr

[ezGuy]

Hi,
I had a google crawl today, and now my page rank osciallates between 0 and 5. The same page has a PR 0 sometimes, and some other times a PR of 5 (I like the 5 better!). I havent't been able to figure out the logic.

Anyone has seen it and figured it out?

ezGuy

[Woz]

PageRank is always unstable during updates. Give it a day or two to let it settle down.

Onya
Woz

[ezGuy]

Thank Onya,

I hope it settle on 5 and not 0!. I will wait a few days. After almost disappearing for 2 months, my site has got some recognition by Google.

ezGuy

[taxpod]

I see PR as typically unstable for as much as 5 days during the update. Be patient.

[Woz]

>Thank Onya,

Hehe, me Woz, Onya means "Good On You".

"You know what",
"You know who".

[ezGuy]

Woz,

What language is that?!

[ezGuy]

Ok, no need to respond. "onya" is Aussie

http://www.aussieslang.com/slang/aussie-slang-o.asp (I think I saw your name somewhere on this site)

ezGuy

[pmac]

:) :) :)

[JonB]

"strange" - two days now when i turn on the computer and ceck dmoz.org i get pr 10. imediatelly after that i put "www" infrom of dmoz.org and get pr 9. after that i can do whatever i like but dmoz is always pr 9!so how man of you are seeing pr 10 for dmoz? and if you do what i did, do you still see pr 10?

[troels nybo nielsen]

I did the samme thing, JonB, and www sent PR up to 10. But only the first time. Now it's 9.

Acouple of my own pages are still oscillating a bit between 4 and 5 but with a tendency to stay on 4, their old value.

Woz
Maybe I should begin saying "mojn". It literally means "good morning" in a certain danish dialect, but the locals use it all the day for both "howdoyoudo" and "goodbye".

Mojn
Troels

[rfgdxm1]

>"strange" - two days now when i turn on the computer and ceck dmoz.org i get pr 10. imediatelly after that i put "www" infrom of dmoz.org and get pr 9. after that i can do whatever i like but dmoz is always pr 9!so how man of you are seeing pr 10 for dmoz? and if you do what i did, do you still see pr 10?

At dance time, PR displayed tends to fluctuate between the old and new value. My guess is the DMOZ will be PR10 again.

[leskent]

With a little poking around with a sniffer and route tracer, I found out the following:

- PageRank toolbar queries get done via HTTP protocol to a server called toolbarqueries.google.com.
- There are six DNS records for this address that round robin as follows:
216.239.51.102 (Verio co-lo in VA?), 216.239.53.102 (Google Palo Alto?), 216.239.33.102 (Exodus co-lo in Santa Clara?), 216.239.37.102 (Exadus co-lo in Washington DC?) and 216.239.39.102 (Exodus co-lo in Washington DC?). The locations are best guesses based on traceroute names.
- I presume that there is a load balancing server farm behind each IP address at each data center.

The PageRank for my site is changing based on which data center it queries, but even then it is not 100% consistent. Right now my site has a PageRank of 5 at three of the data centers most of the time, and 3 (It's old rank) at two of the data centers 100% consistently. I presume the mixed results even at a single data center are the result of unfinished replication to the server farm.

I assume that the database updates are orginated at Google's HQ in Mountain View (Or maybe they have a data center in Palo Alto?) and then replicate to remote sites. It looks like the colocation sites in California get updated before the sites in Washington. I imagine they have a lot of data to move when this happens.

Anyway that is what I think may be going on behind the sceens. I could be wrong...

Les

[glengara]

I've even noticed PR fluctuating in the directory in the last 36 hours.

[leskent]

I figured out one more thing, if you point your browser to any of those IP addresses above (i.e. [216.239.51.102...] for Washington DC), it goes to a Google home search page that represents the Google database that is running at that data center. It is clear that that the data center in Washington does not yet have the updated Google database (at least for my site), because all the pages listed for my site are last months version.

So in summary, I think the PageRank toolbar is accurate, to the extent that someone who is searching Google is getting that view of your site and the old database. Testing it five times (by hitting forward/backward) should give you a fairly good view (but not 100%). Until you get consistent PageRank results, it shows that old data still exists out in Google's search database for some subset of users.

Les

[MJR]

I have noticed for months now that generally when the PR is fluctuating the 2nd PR, up or down, is what at the end of the update your PR will settle on, if you see no change then there will be no change. Not scientific, just what I have observed when monitoring my sites and the sites I'm interested in :)

[troels nybo nielsen]

Welcome to WW, leskent.

That sounds extremely interesting. I look forward to reading more posts from you. :-)