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Sorry if this has been answered before, but I was wondering... I installed the google toolbar about 3 weeks ago, and I think it's great! However, whenever I visited google.com/intl/en/ there was never a page rank for their own site. Now in the past few days I noticed it's green. Well.. sometimes it is. Seems to adjust itself and go green either whenever it wants, or when you press on the back button. Is this new for google? .. or has my toolbar simply gone mad?
Thanks for any heads up on this.
~Cheers
I think what you are experiencing is not PR flux, but just a bit of lag for the PR to show when you visit a new page.
Google has a PR of 10, so the bar will be completely green.
Webmaster World has a PR of 7 or 8 (cant remember) so the bar will be 7/10 or 8/10 green.
But sometimes when you visit a page, the PR doesnt show at all (grey bar). This is just a minor bug in the toolbar.
A few points to note about the toolbar:
> It merely calculates PR based on the same algo Google uses - so it's not a live representation of PR, merely an estimate based on certain factors.
> The PR for a page may differ depending on how the address is laid out - eg - www.domain.com may have a different PR from www.domain.com/ (not sure if i have explained this correctly...).
The PR flux that Jenstar refered to is the transition period after Google updates it's index (which is happening just now), where "old PR" and "new PR" can display at different times for a few days.
This usually settles down to the new PR after a while (for example, my own site homepage has been moving between PR5 and PR6 over the past week).
Don't worry about it too much! ;)
Scott
I've been realizing after going through Webmasterworld that there are a lot of "smarties" around here! Wow! I feel like I'm just starting out on the net after just reading a whole bunch of posts. Which leads me to ask you... how do you know when Google is updating their index? and one more if you don't mind: What rating is considered fair? I have a PR of 5 is this a good starting point?
I have to admit that it's been a long time since I considered the thought of how to gain exposure through links etc... Now that I'm interested again, things have really changed. It's not so easy as before when it comes to Search Engines, where when I started they were hungry for your stuff, and now: you can't do this, you have to do this, change that, change this -- I'm going mad :D and to top things off, I just learned of the PR ranking with the toolbar, only because I just found Alexa, and thought.. hey this is pretty cool. Surely I've been out of the loop although I'm here everyday. I guess I just want to say.. thank goodness there's WebmasterWorld, and coffee :)
Also, keep in mind, most of what people post here is simply regurgated from what they have read here before, added to what they have learned from experience.
I would say that most people here follow the same principles but almost everyone has their own unique way of applying it. My point is - read and learn, but dont take everything as being fact - make up your own mind.
To answer your questions...
1. Check the webmaster world homepage - as soon as the update begins, it is announced and the update thread begins.
2. PR5 is generally considered (I believe) slightly above average, therefore good! :) Your PR will increase, the more inbound links you get.
Also...
Alexa is a nice tool, but the traffic value is pretty innacurate because its based on stats from their toolbar users and not the web as a whole.
Yeh, there are a lot of do's and don'ts in SEO, and what's more - lots of people with have many different opinions as to where the proverbial line lies! ;)
But, the best anyone can do is try to weed out the fact from the fiction and add what you already know! :)
Good luck!
Scott
There are many who would be quite happy with a PR5. It's a great PR to have, especially when you are learning. Have you compared your PR to the PR of your competitors? That will give you a gauge of what to strive for, unless you happen to be PR-advantaged over them already.
The quickest way to know if the update started is if you see the number of backlinks for Yahoo change in the different datacenters. Or just keep an eye on WebmasterWorld, because a message is usually posted within 30 seconds of the update (dance) starting.
Mmmmmmm.... caffeine ;) And welcome to WebmasterWorld! Won't be long before you are one of the "smarties" too ;)
<edit>Marketing Guy beat me to most of your questions. Takes me a little longer when I am interupted six times while typing a single response ;) </edit>
