Google Page Ranking question

[Barb]

What times during the year does Google update/cycle the page rankings?

Is it every March, June, Sept, Dec ...

or?

Would like to know how long I have before they update for I am currently doing link exchanges to try and up the ranking before the next update.

[tedster]

The Page Rank that you see in the toolbar is only refreshed about 4 times a year - and is only there to provide a rough idea of the situation. But the real PR that Google uses behind the scenes to position your pages in the search results is being updated continually.

The same comments apply to backlinks. Even more, the link: opreator never gives more than a small sampling of what is actually in the index, and new links are spidered and factored in continually.

[Barb]

Ted,

Thanks for the reply. I have a better understanding of that situation now.

Now, here's another question....

If I do a Google search for my website and I know it is not going to be on page 1, is there an easy way to find my site without wading through all the pages to find it AND yet still see what page it falls on?

Another words, do a Google search for www.mysite.com and get a result that says something along the lines of:

www.mysite.com Site listing # 345 on page 10 (or some such).

Or is that a pipedream?

[tedster]

You can set your Google "preferences" to show 100 results per page -- and then use your domain as a "find in page" search. Only ten pages to look at, and just hit F3 after the page loads (not too bad).

The only hang up is that changing to 100 results also changes how the indented results are clustered -- so this can shift things around a bit. For instance, assume that some domain in the results holds #3 and #99 when you look at 10 results per page. When you change to 100 results per page, that becomes #3 and #4.

With a Google API key and some decent programming chops, I suppose this could be automated.