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Pagerank queries - the <rk> parameter

What do such figures as Rank_1:1:6 Rank_1:1:5 mean?

         

selomelo

10:10 pm on Feb 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



We already know that toolbar PR is in fact an historical figure. When you query google for current PR, you get some mysterious figures such as:

Rank_1:1:6 Rank_1:1:5 Rank_1:1:4 Rank_1:1:4 Rank_1:1:5 Rank_1:1:6 Rank_1:1:5 Rank_1:1:0 Rank_1:1:1 Rank_1:1:5 Rank_1:1:2 Rank_1:1:3 Rank_1:1:0 Rank_1:1:0 Rank_1:1:3

These figures are for a site that has a current toolbar of PR4.

I searched the web for an explanation, but failed to get a good one.

Is there any idea as to what all these magical numbers mean?

Oliver Henniges

8:43 pm on Feb 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



> or show N/A if that is wrong URL.
what does that mean precisely? If that is not the url requested? In that case I can't support that. I receive a perfect rk-value for my site in the XML-file, while the rocketpage shows N/A.

Hanu

9:15 pm on Feb 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Oliver, AFAIK Google uses DNS-based load balancing, aka. round robin DNS. When you query at the SOA ("zone info") for toolbarqueries.google.com using nslookup or a similar tool you will notice that the time-to-live value is set to 1 minute:


C:\>nslookup
Default Server: <snip>
Address: 12.34.56.78

> set type=SOA
> toolbarqueries.google.com
Server: <snip>
Address: 12.34.56.78

Non-authoritative answer:
toolbarqueries.google.com canonical name = toolbarqueries.l.google.com

l.google.com
primary name server = a.l.google.com
responsible mail addr = dns-admin.google.com
serial = 1267475
refresh = 900 (15 mins)
retry = 900 (15 mins)
expire = 1800 (30 mins)
default TTL = 60 (1 min)

> set type=A
> toolbarqueries.google.com
Server: <snip>
Address: 12.34.56.78

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: toolbarqueries.l.google.com
Addresses: 216.239.53.99, 216.239.53.104
Aliases: toolbarqueries.google.com

>

This means that clients may only cache the resulting IP address for 60 seconds and that they have to resolve the name again after that. Every time the client resolves toolbarqueries.google.com, it could get a different IP, i.e. a different datacenter (DC). That way Google can control which DCs are live as well as distribute the load among their DCs. The fact that they use a special name for toolbar queries might indicate that they use a different set of live DCs to serve these requests. What I don't know is whether the Big Daddy DCs are live for either normal or toolbar queries. I just haven't kept track of that.

Oliver Henniges

10:29 pm on Feb 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Could it be that the toolbar identifies itself in a special way (HTTP user agent?) so that googles server knows that the request doesn't come from browser and distributes the request to very particular DCs?

I found that sometimes when querying for these rk-values at toolbarqueries.google.com in the past days the xml-file showed my "future page rank", whereas the toolbar constantly sticked to the old value.

Ellio

11:03 pm on Feb 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



>>>> or show N/A if that is wrong URL.
what does that mean precisely? If that is not the url requested? In that case I can't support that. I receive a perfect rk-value for my site in the XML-file, while the rocketpage shows N/A. <<<<

The only time we have seen the "NA" result on the rocket page is when that DC does not list the page being searched.

ie: the page is not in that DC index for some reason.

We quried this with Rocket page and then found our page had gone missing from the index!

King of all Sales

11:57 pm on Feb 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Our homepage shows a tbpr of 5 but n/a in the rocket tool. It is listed correctly in the index when searching site:www.widget.com. All second tier pages show pr4 in the rocket tool.

Jim Westergren

4:04 am on Feb 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I just realized the abbreviation for RK.

It is RanK. Why?

The RK values shows up on "&features=Rank", also "Rank".

PR is not a Google official abbreviation, it is something SEOs made up. They have PageRank and use the "Rank" part of the word, simple.

Checking the example above of Cutts blog posts shows that those DCs that has higher RK has a higher "Rank" as well.

Jim Westergren

4:19 am on Feb 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think we should all come to an agreement that LivePR, my tool and the genuine Google Toolbar for Firefox are simply different ways to query the same interface.

The RK values and the TBPR are total different.

Do the <RK> values depend on the type of query or not? For example, could it ever happen that the RK for

You always get the same RK value for an URL, no matter which query you use - just like the TBPR.

Is the <RK> returned by the BD DC's a live value, i.e. the ominous internal PR, or is just the toolbar PR?

As seen in my examples the RK is updating as soon as the DC is caching pages. And it is 100% not the toolbar PR.

If it is not the internal PR, it is something that is very very close to being it.

there are two sets of <rk> values out there non-bd and bd - as Big Daddy has a different crawling structure then this makes sense.

Yep, and it is very interesting.

Our homepage shows a tbpr of 5 but n/a in the rocket tool. It is listed correctly in the index when searching site:www.widget.com. All second tier pages show pr4 in the rocket tool.

If you get N/A, use Hanus tool and search for your URL and see the RK in the XML feed for your URL.

FromRocky

7:11 am on Feb 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Our homepage shows a tbpr of 5 but n/a in the rocket tool. It is listed correctly in the index when searching site:www.widget.com.

This is also applied to one of my sites. All DC's in the Rockettool show N/A. It's a three month old site.

jameswatt

8:43 am on Feb 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



hi

few days back i check my recent optimized site <snip> PR.
The PR was 0 but on the date 21 feb when i checked the Pr of that site i found PR 4 in google tool bar.
so i was quite happy.But today the same story PR shows 0 for my site.....
So i would like to know what is exactly going on...

can any body tell me pls....

[edited by: engine at 10:51 am (utc) on Mar. 6, 2006]
[edit reason] No URLs, thanks [/edit]

Jim Westergren

10:27 am on Feb 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Yep, and encoraging from my point of view too :) - However, I dont see a significant difference between the ranks between the 2 - yes we have MC example - but Matt has also said that Big Daddy is not about ranking changes at this stage - just infastructure. Of course new pages may be slightly different.

Yes, true but what I more wanted to demonstrate in my MC examples of new pages were the fact that those DCs with a low RK value are probably those DCs that has not been updated lately = low number of backlinks found = low RK = lower rank.

Also an issue that confused me is this recent PR update seems to have hit all DCs - including the Big Daddy ones - and the serp shift on the 2-4th Feb, hit all DCs - slightly surprised that the PR update that was calculated on the non-bd dcs has effected the BD results.

This is strange for me. Toolbar PR updates should not make a difference in SERPs. But perhaps some export of new data ... like RK values .. hmmm

So perhaps an exported universal PR figure overrides or works in conjunction/is a multiple of the local <rk> figure - this may not apply to new pages.

Interesting theory.

At this moment I am just not 100% sure that the <rk> values are effecting the serp position - this might be the current calculation of the <rk>/pr but is an export required for these figures to take effect in the serps? If you have a TBPR of 0 but an <rk> of 5 can you rank (except when 0 means new)?

Hmm, more testing and checking needs to be done. I will do that later. A TBPR of 0 and <rk> of 5 means for me that GoogleBot has found backlinks since the last TBPR update, otherwise it should not be 5.

My question also is:

Let's assume RK is same as internal PR. Why no decimals on the numbers? Low or high PR 8 is a huge difference.

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