Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
PR update start?
But this morning I find a old site's PR get down, from 8 to 7.
Theory 1: Update isn't complete, and home page will soon move to PR 5 (sounds like wishful thinking to me).
Theory 2: There's a bunch of external inbound links to my new PR5 that I can't locate anywhere (but Googlebot did). Seems a little suspicious that such a new page could have spontaneously gotten more IBL than the 2-year old home page. Not impossible, but I'm dubious.
Theory 3: Oddly enough, the new page was designed specifically to attract bookmarks. It has frequently updated price information, and is the only page on the site that says "bookmark me to stay uptodate" and provides a little JavaScript to make bookmarking as easy as clicking. Maybe a fair number of people did bookmark it and (put tinfoil hat on here) Google is somehow able to track browser bookmarks and count them in PR calculations. OK, I shouldn't even have mentioned that theory, since too many WebmasterWorld members are wearing their tinfoil hats full time already :-)
This tends to get swamped in large sites by the usually greater links to the site itself and not show up but I once linked into a page on a low PR site with very few inbounds from an internal page on one of my sites and that site's PR (the one I linked to) on that page suddenly was higher than anything else on the site.
On most dc's I look at, link results have reverted to old data, not the FEB-15 links. Wonder if, like the "real PR" / toolbar PR" there is an up-to-date "real links" index that doesn't show up on a link:www.widgets.com search.
ronburk, its possible to have an internal page with a higher PR than the index page IF links in are that good.
Good point. So a better theory is: somebody gave me a single, pretty nice inbound link to that internal page, and I just can't find it yet (can't be more than a few weeks old, so that may make it harder to find).
Still... I just hand-scanned every hit for that page in the logs (not much traffic, only been around a month, so not hard to do) and can't find a single hit with a "real" referrer field from a website. Seems a little odd that I would pick up a link from a good PR page, but that page generates virtually no traffic.
Still..., could be somebody's personal links page that has real good PR, nobody but the owner clicks on it, and the owner uses a browser that masks the Referer field.
Sure does have me curious now :-).
All my internal pages PR gone. Only the home page is having a PR of 7. dunno watz exactly is going on.
I have introduced 301 in my website a month ago. But then the url's which was launched few months back was having a high PR. Those url's PR is also gone.
dunno how to react to the present situation.....
Do nothing at the moment.
Its happened to us as well many different web sites.
We've seen strange things happen like this before in the last couple of years.
Whilst an update is in progress best just to enjoy other things in life a wait for it to end.
For sure Google is doing something different this time round so I guess we'll see many strange reports.
Whilst an update is in progress best just to enjoy other things in life a wait for it to end.
Excellent advice! Now if I can just make my self follow it.
A domain that I own, has been online for two years, has NO inbound links, has NOT been updated whatsoever for those two years, now suddenly has PR4 (was and always has been PR1).
Very strange indeed....
Since last few days my site's home page Pr was toggling between Pr 0 and Pr 2. At this time all the inner pages were with Pr 0. Now in last month home page has got a stable pr 2 and all the inner pages are with pr 3. So its definitely a change in Pr going on.
Also I wud like to ask one question. I have heard that inner pages pass the pr back to home page. So when inner pages are passing pr back to home page will it make a difference if i use www.mydomain.com/index.html and not www.mydomain.com to link back to home page.
Shud these be considered as two different pages due to which my home page's pr is 2 and not 4 which it should be ideally. As home page shud have mor epr then inner page.
I look forward to hearing from you. Any information, suggestion are most welcome.
Thanks,
bigdream
While I'd like to be optimistic about this, I'm of the opinion that this is either an error, or there's been some fundamental change in the calculation of PR.
Same here. I have a new domain that is barely three months old and it's now a PR 6.
For quite some time, Google has given new sites (which have made it past all the filters) a nice boost in rankings for a few days. I think its their way of announcing a new site has hit the block.
Its a nice feature and one which I think is deserving of many thanks for some of us webmasters who may want to link to these new sites.
Perhaps ... just perhaps Google gives all new sites which get past all the filters an automatic PR6 for a few days. It makes sense now that I think about it. New sites (which meet all Google guidelines) get a brief boost in rankings which allows them to be found by those webmasters paying attention. If they are good enough, perhaps ... just perhaps we will deem them worthy of a link?
I think this is just Google's way of identifying new sites and shoving them to the forefront for a few days to get the attention all newbies rightly deserve. If they are worth linking to, we will (or should) link. If not, we won't. If this is Google's point, I think it is brilliant! I just wish Google would confirm or deny their intentions one way or the other so that webmasters could know for sure that this really IS the point!
C'mon Matt ... jump in here and confirm or deny. I would put money on my theory, but I know hundreds will shoot me down. Its about time Google spells things out a little more clearly for some of us who may be a little slow on the uptake ... don't cha think?
I am tired. I am a yacht charter broker who builds her own pages. I have to admit that I do enjoy the diversion of building my own web pages ....... but it is not what I do for a living!
There are many of us out here who are just trying to produce the best websites we are capable of. A well written, clear and concise set of rules from each of the search engines would be greatly appreciated.
Looks like by the end of the weekend, the density will be going back down though. Very strange.
does it mean anything, the bloated PR going to settle by weekend?
or its just a casual remark in happy mood after a mc happy meal
change of the algo probably to target certain types of spam.
Google is somehow able to track browser bookmarks and count them in PR calculations
I consider this a fact. My brother has a site which has a random page with funny videos. This page wasn't optimized in any way and a few months ago all of the sudden became PR 7. The page hasn't gotten any incoming links naturally either so this must have been caused by people bookmarking the page.
Check Google's search engine patent from a few years ago too. There's a few items about the toolbar tracking what people do.
Alternatively what about a combination of the two? A site that gets traffic from "nowhere" could be considered more valuable than one that always gets traffic from predictable sources like search engines (in the sense that it is potentially worth more because someone bothered to bookmark it). After all what better vote can you have than many individuals deciding a site is valuable enough to bookmark? Given the ability to track IP addresses this might be harder to fake as well.
Then again, given how dire Google are at solving relatively simple problems I'm not sure I'd credit them with the sophistication to do any of this.
Could Google Analytics be a factor? It has been around just long enough for it to perhaps be considered? Seems more realistic to see Google using actual data they have on traffic than data we think they might have about bookmarks.
no way, my recently created link page, without any traffic is now PR4, same as main page, whereas the most frequented page is still PR2
It would be interesting to know if those weird PR updates are already impacting in the relevancy (SERPs) of your pages or in the deep indexing; or are they just a couple of green pixels on the toolbar? What was the impact?
It would be interesting to know if those weird PR updates are already impacting in the relevancy (SERPs) of your pages or in the deep indexing; or are they just a couple of green pixels on the toolbar? What was the impact?
Well in the past the TBPR was a historical score which would have already impacted the serps.
I dont think that it would be sensible at this stage, with all the changes going on, to say that past behaviour means that this happened this time around.
For a start an export was done whereby the new calculation did not takeover from the old calculation - it was more of new pages recieved the new calculation of PR while the old PR still remaining for existing pages.
My home page only has PR 5 and I doubt the new pages have any links other than a few internal links--according to Google they have none.
Several new sites I manage raised in PR on their home page.
One thing I noticed re Supplementals, I had checked all my clients for hijackers over the weekend not realizing there was an update going on and noticed that all the sites where I have been trying to get rid of supplementals are mostly gone. These were usually pages that had been redirected with 301s or set up so they would return a 404 months ago via htaccess.
Anyone know #*$! is going on?
I think this relates to an oddity in the toolbar PR as opposed to "real PR" (the PR index Google uses in calculating SERP's which appears to be a lot fresher than the PR shown in the toolbar).
The other time it just went on for many sites for a week-10 days without ever affecting SERP's and then toolbar PR went back to normal.
