Checking backlinks to ensure no PR0

when is the best time to check them

[leef50]

When does google take backlinks into consideration? During a deep crawl or during the update? Just wanted to set a day aside to check all PR on sites im linking to so as to avoid the obvios conqequences.

[pageoneresults]

Hello leef50. Backlinks are calculated during the once monthly update. Those backlinks that are calculated come from the previous crawl cycle.

So, for example, if you were crawled in the beginning of January 2003, your backlinks will most likely show during the monthly update which historically happens during the last week of the month.

[Macguru]

I check them once a month. Only a handfull of links to bad pages are pulled every year from hundreds of sites. I think a few links to bad pages wont hurt you as long you have a proper balance.

Untill now, I never had any problems with this approach. As long you do control it on a regular basis, dont worry too much about it. Do it when you have time to do it.

[ciml]

At the update, Google calculates PageRank based on the backlinks it found during the deep crawl.

Two things to watch while checking PageRank are the Toolbar guess for pages with no PageRank, and 'merged URLs' where you may see the PR belonging to another URL.

It used to be the case that you could use Google's cache to spot these things, but now you can see the PageRank from the last full update, with the cache from the Fresh bot. If anyone knows a way round this other than checking only at the start of an update...