Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I noticed a general drop in PR of most of my sites by 1, though some are up. The only way I can explain this is that the standards just got made tougher. I'm not complaining, because my flagship site, for its most competitive search term, just jumped from 6th in Google to #2, jumping over some very heavy-duty competition. This is a search term for which people are paying $5-10 per click with adwords, so it is very competitive. And the PR just dropped from 5 to 4. I think Google is placing less emphasis on PR.
It's clearly a major revision in their PR algorithm. I've noticed the heaviest effect on internal pages. I think Google isn't paying much as attention now to links from lower PR pages--those links have been devalued.
[edited by: tedster at 7:32 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2007]
Most of us know that when one page links to another it passes a percentage of its PR on to that page however; it doesn't lose any PR. With the astonishing number of pages being created every day, the total PR grows with it. If Google's toolbar reflects the same scale in 5 years as it does today, we'll all have PR 10 webpages.
Actually, this is inaccurate. Pagerank is a measure of the number of links inbound that pass pagerank to the receiving page. The amount of pagerank those links pass is also dependent on those and other factors. With every link that pages has leaving it, pagerank is passed out. Pagerank is not created with new pages.
Overall the number of higher pagerank pages on the internet is decreasing, with a larger percentage of websites at pagerank 4-5 than ever before.
A good analogy is dilution of ink in water. The more water, the more diluted the ink.
THE FIRST LINK
So, for example, every link votes some PageRank to its target page. That initial single step does not "take away" any PageRank from the source page, it just uses the source page's PR to weight each of its link-votes.
THE FULL JOURNEY
The next factor, however, is also critical. What do the paths around the full webmap look like that end up back at the source url for the link? Internally in any given domain, it is most common that those pages also link back to the source page of the link via some path - usually a short one.
There may also be pages elsewhere on the web that receive outbound links and then they vote that PageRank onward through a path that eventually arrives back.
BACK TO THE START
As PageRank votes eventually arrive back at the starting url, those votes increase the PageRank of the starting url. Then the next iteration from that source page begins with a higher PR value. All that circulation continues to be iterated around and around the webmap until the PR equation's damping factor brings the amount of PR change from a further iteration to settle down below a limit. Then the calculation can stop.
LEAKING PR?
The idea of leaking PR comes from the fact that links to internal URLs will rapidly circulate PageRank back to the source page, but outbound links will slice off a share of the PR vote that is not likely to get voted back so quickly. In that case the internal links are given a slightly lower weight and they have slightly less PR to circulate back. But that's not the same as "leaking PR", it just means that PR has not increased as much as it might have.
THE RANDOM WALK MODEL
The best mental model for PR I've found is the random walk model. What are the odds that following random links from page to page around the web will bring a surfer to to a given url? PR 9 means that 9 times out of 10 a random walk will bring a surfer to this url. So the question of outbound links becomes "does this link increase the odds that a random walk of the web will bring the surfer to this url?"
DO YOU NEED THE COMMUNITY?
Websites tend to group into nodes on a webmap that are tightly interrelated. Linking out, especially within that node or community, can often result in increased awareness of a site. And that increased awareness can lead to natural growth of links back.
Looking at only one moment in the web's history, hoarding PR may seem like a good step. My practical experience tells me that, over time, PR hoarding is not wise. It's something like being a hermit in order to help your own survivial. The reality is, most of the time, it takes a community to help you get along.
I is not happy.
tedster, thank you. This is one of the answers I was seeking.
The other is if text link ads on my home page are detrimental in any way to my page ranking. But if a drop in page rank isn't a negative to my traffic then maybe I don't even need the answer to that question.
>> PageRank FAQs
I started reading them before I posted the question. But wading through long pages of technical and other jargon can be overwhelming for a person who is not a web developer.
webwannabee
Thank you so much for your take on this. It was helpful and insightful.
CainIV wrote:
>>If pagerank concerns you you might consider learning what it is, and there are tons of posts in WBW which talk extensively about what it is (and is not)
Respectfully, the tons of posts and extensive talk is precisely what is overwhelming for someone like me. I am not a web developer; don't even know how to hand-code a html table. I don't have the time to spend hours wading through stuff; I sincerely just need a place to come to get some answers to basic questions.
Thanks again to everyone for sharing your insights.
This is a year old thin affiliate site goog never really liked however about a month ago I started tackling the thinness problem with some minor but promising results.
[edited by: tedster at 8:54 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
My PR has gone from 4 to 0(white bar) in two stages and the site command is showing less that half the number of my pages it usually shows, BUT, vistor counts are up for the month,and my SERP positions seem to be holding ok....
Do I have anything to be concerned about?
Boot up the comp this morning, and all pages of my site are showing PR0.
So far, SERPs are not affected, but it does make me nervous.
shallow, Google is not located in one place, they have many banks of servers spread around the world called data centers. They all share info but it's not instant, so during a PR update you may see different PR on different data centers. We can also see updates there that do not yet show on the toolbar. There are free online tools for viewing your "future pagerank" or multiple data center PR. It's not like they see deep into the future though, maybe a day or two.
"well i always thought PR is given after considering quality links to your sites. i blogged about my college life since a year or so. i have no backlinks at all from anywhere. and in this oct. google dance, they gave me a PR 4. now can anybody explain this thing to me coz i've been trying like hell to get a PR 4 for my other blog which has sufficient amount of links and still G gave me a PR 2 this oct.
i guess they gave it for the originality of the posts i have. on my college blog i have 99 posts. and on the other i have about 60 posts. i didn't even know that my college diary has a PR 4. *stunned* "
so what do you guys think of this?
What are you using to gauge the backlinks your site does have.
Perhaps you need to learn how to check your backlinks somewhere besides G. If you are relying on G to give you a count, that mistake, is causing your incorrect conclusion.
WW_Watcher
Edited to add:
Sorry jakegotmail, you asked that question.
[edited by: WW_Watcher at 1:32 am (utc) on Nov. 16, 2007]
A "datacenter" is a building, or a room full of servers in a building.
Many here(and just about everywhere) call Google IP address that respond to queries behind the smoke and mirrors of DNS, "Datacenters" but that is not what they are. They are just IP addresses of load balancers, that can point to other loadbalancers, or servers within a datacenter.
WW_Watcher
It seems that the page drop and the pr drop when hand in hand. Just the day before this happened my pr was at 2 and the page count via the site command was where it always has been, then next day, BANG! no PR and about half of the pages appearing to be gone from the site command...from 1590 to 869 overnight.
Something has got to be going on here. Have never sold links of any sort. Did have 3 links on my home page that were there as a courtsey to my other site owner friends, just your basic recip link for my customers whom might have found those sites useful. Have removed them just in case, but dont see how they could have been the problem, but then again I aint Google....
So, I use eight text link ads on the home page of my site. Is the consensus that ads like these should be removed.?
I make a couple hundred dollars month from these ads. And I approve them so they fit in with the theme of my site.
[edited by: Simsi at 7:51 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2007]
Don't remove them, just nofollow them.
The six text link ads on my site had nofollow. Didn't help. Google just reduced my site down to PR0. 18 months ago this was PR6. This is a well respected, 5 year old site of 700 plus content pages that is ranked as a top 10,000 site in Quantcast and in the top 100,000 in Alexa and receives over 250K U.S. monthly uniques.
No blackhat SEO, AdSense ads on most pages, some books, network banner ads on about half the pages. So far no change in SERP results, but I don't understand the PR devaluation at all.
I believe it is against the terms of service. I'm using TextLink ads, not just individual text ads.
There's no way they'd penalise your site for being on the same server as someone else.
One of the liabilities of sharing an IP address is that some administrative panels have had vulnerabilities, technical holes that allow site owners access to other domains on the shared IP address. Some opporunitistic marketers have found ways to do "parasite hosting" through such holes.
I'm not saying that this definitely has happened to you, but it would be a good thing to review all your files for things like hidden links that you never placed there, iframes that you never wrote into your code, and so on. Even, perhaps, entire html pages that are hosted parasitically.
My experience with shared IP addresses is that Google trouble often comes from something the hosting server is actually reporting as content on your domain. My reason for caution is this: if your files have been compromised, then you might just copy the parasite materials onto any new server or IP address that you contract for.
Also we have subdomains, which are considered outside sites... (another dumb idea) they should be consider the same as the site since i need to own the main domain to have a sub-domain of it.
I'm actually getting tired with this all.
And am really about to start to rel=nofollow everylink.....
thats the next big google bomb. Kill the linking by ref=nofollow everything and we are back to the early days of the internet.
the whole page rank thing is dumb, and when you look at certain seo sites i find it funny how they use redirect pages for every outside link.... Are they afraid of passing something off to another site. and do they know something we don't?
I can't believe Google is not sophisticated enough to understand how shared hosting works. There's no way they'd penalise your site for being on the same server as someone else.It would not be the first time Google commits a mistake.
tedster wrote:
it would be a good thing to review all your files for things like hidden links that you never placed there, iframes that you never wrote into your code, and so on.Thanks for the heads up. All my sites are very small (30 pages or so) and purely static, so I can't see it happening. However I will double-check.
Have you checked stats in Webmaster Tools? I just logged into my account, and the crawl stats are still showing an assorted gauge of Page Rank from High to Low and unassigned.
What I'm wondering now...is this PR drop only visible via Google Toolbar, but still showing up under the Webmaster Tools, for everyone affected?
I just checked the Google Directory, and I'm still showing PR there.
Is the PR penalty limited only to the PR viewed via the Google Toolbar then? Is this normal? As in, is this what normally happens with PR changes...or are they normally reflected also in the Google directory and Webmaster Tools?
