PR Update - January 2008

[MLHmptn]

Seems Google started this PR update a little early? Seeing tons of sites with PR jumps or is it a temporary glitch like some have reported this last week? Seeing this PR update on 72.14.253.99, .103 & .147. Not that PR matters anymore but just thought some might want to know your green bar is moving!

[joergnw10]

It looks like all pages from my site that are not listed using site:mysite.com/* have been greyed out - lots :-(

[Lesedar]

The internal pages of my sites that were greyed out are listed in the results by typing site:mysite.com

[gosman]

2 of my sites showing lots of internal grey. But still showing with site: command.

[HarryM]

I hope this update isn't over. What I'm seeing on some sites makes little sense. One has the home page plus most other pages at PR0, but a few deeper pages at PR4.

[gosman]

I've just noticed something strange.

The only internal pages on my sites that now have PR are pages that have external links pointing to them. It's like G is not passing PR from internal pages.

Can anyone else confirm this?

[Lesedar]

I have pages with external links pointing to them greyed out and on the opposite pages only with internal links which retain their ranking.

[sandboxsam]

What does it mean to have Google "gray bar" your website’s internal page?

When you do a search using the internal page URL, does it comeback with a result for that URL? Or does come back with, could not be found?

Is this the new way supplementals are presented?

[tedster]

Gray bar means that the toolbar server does not return a number. I think this happens for many reasons, mostly hidden from our view. I see supplemental urls that do show a PR number (usually low but not always) and regular index urls that show gray bar. So I don't think there's a correlation.

I just think of gray barred PR as "data not available". For example, one browser-based SEO tool that I use reports gray bar PR as NaN (not a number).

[Robert Charlton]

On this update, I've seen that the bar is slow to respond on some pages... so the update may still be a work in process. Either gray shows for a few moments before the green and white appear, or else getting the green and white has required a page refresh. But yes, at first glance, on some sites I've looked at, gray is more common than I've previously noticed it.

[makpie]

I have seen urls with grey or just white TB to rank at the top ten and urls with PR4 or 5 to rank nowhere.
As for this update I am happy with it.

[Bewenched]

I hope this is just another "Lets float the garbage to the top so we can scrape it off" updates. We have lost a lot of traffic in the last 4-5 days.

Really making me nervous.

We haven't made significant changes.
We haven't done any ...I mean ANY black hat or linking at all.
We have had google site maps since it first began.
We are an 11 year old site.
We do run google adword campaigns.
We have a select few pages that do run google ads on them
(helps pay for the server)

Sadly we do need to make some changes to the site but I'm almost afraid to change anything.

[tedster]

Bewenched, I've never seen Google use PR updates like that. Now ranking and algo updates, that's another discussion.

Back before Google launched the link seller PR demotions, Matt Cutts blogged that around Google a PR update was pretty much a non-event" Besides, a PR update doesn't really create any "top" to work with.

[masood82]

hi every body i have a problem two of my sites have lost pr one was 4 now it is on 3 and one was on 3 now it is on 2 the ranking of second one has improved considerably it has come into top 5 of its phrase but the other one which had pr 4 remains the same ranking as it was 6 months ago i dont know can any one explain what is this and how can i retain my pr.

[edited by: tedster at 6:23 am (utc) on Jan. 14, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[tedster]

Masood, that is a very common event when Google updates toolbar PR,as they are doing right now. There are constantly more pages being added to the web, so one way to understand this is that there is less PageRank to "go around". Many pages go down by 1 in the recalculation during every update.

If your rankings are staying stable, that's what matters. PageRank depends on links and how the entire web is interconnected through them. To maintain or improve the PR of a url, its interlinking to the entire web usually needs to improve as well.

[dukelips]

one of my sites show pr0 but some 25 pages have been indexed in google.
what could be the reason

[tedster]

If the PR 0 is shown as a white bar in the toolbar, then your PR does exist and the value is between zero and one.

[dukelips]

other pages show a page rank of 3

[rank]

We're noticing something quite interesting with one of our sites. The homepage of the site, and most of the older pages of the site have all had a PR of 3, but we noticed recently a drop in the homepage PR to 2.

The strange bit occurred when we noticed the secondary level pages have increased to 4 / 10! Some of these had 0 / 10 before the update.

Seems like a more fundamental change than the recent changes we've seen. From our experience the norm is for the homepage to have the higher PR (our homepage has more inbound links to it)

Anyone else seeing something like this?

[jerome]

It may be a bit early to tell, but a site we launched last october and that had a PR0 until then (despite a hard, natural and contextual link from a PR8 page on an authority site) now shows a PR5 on all pages.

It might be a toolbar glitch or a temporary thing, though. The site is rather new, with only 90 indexed pages, very few inbound links and the PR8 one does not yet appear on a "link:" search for that domain.

Another site launched at the same time, which serves as a corporate brochure for the above new site and its sister, also went from PR0 to PR4 with close to no inbound links (3, only from our own sites).

I'd be happy with those figures if they are real :)

[Meteko]

All of my sites are updated. Few gain pr, some drop pr. Hope next pr update will be good for me.

[ebound]

I have sites that have been grey for over 2 years that are seeing some shiny new green pr.

[tedster]

Interesting reports here - seems we're hearing about two different patterns:

1. Lowered home page PR with higher PR on internal urls that actually beats the home page.

2. Missing or zero PR on many internal urls, even with a strong home page PR.

I can't quite wrap my head around these two a s being one single thing, but these two patterns do seem to be more widespread than in past updates. I wonder if it is "something new" we're seeing, or just two different kinds of buggy data.

#1 sounds like PR demotions, something like the treatment link-sellers got back in October.

#2 sounds more like a bug to me. I wonder if it might be related to the new way supplemental urls are being treated. That was a significant infrastructure change by Google. But, just guesses here - I've got no hard information right now.

[drall]

I have a graybar page destroying pr7 sites for major 2 word terms and I also have pr7 pages being destroyed by other peoples graybarred pages.

What do we take away from this kids?

TBPR means nothing, it is 3-6 month data that is not even remotely close to accurate and is now being toyed with further "tweaks" including subs 1 level down from a 7 being pr1 but retaining rankings or being graybarred and retaining rankings or being a 6 and loosing rankings.

[dmje]

I do not know what to make of this update. During the last update all the pages of our site went to a whitebar, every single one. We never have bought or sold links and had a nice stable PR 4 on most pages prior to the last update.

Now this one comes along, why so soon? Has not affected us as of yet, cannot really do much more to us anyway. Its just mind boggling...

[Marcia]

The only internal pages on my sites that now have PR are pages that have external links pointing to them. It's like G is not passing PR from internal pages.

Can anyone else confirm this?

I can't confirm (or deny) it, but it's pretty close to what I'm seeing, though I've been suspecting for a while that there are changes in the way PR is distributed internally within sites.

[tedster]

I recently came across a client url with PR6 showing in the toolbar - but the url was supplemental. No dupe issues whatsoever, very useful content, and linked from maybe 95% of their pages as well s from their PR 8 home page. The link is in a supplementary nav template. Makes me go "hmmm."

[Marcia]

The link is in a supplementary nav template.

All the links to that PR6 page are in the supplementary nav template? How about links to that page from other locations, either within or outside the site? Any of those?

Makes me go "hmmm" too.

[gosman]

Hi Guys.

Can you explain supplementary nav template?

[tedster]

I mean the links are not in the main menu but elsewhere on most of the pages, along with 3 other "additional information" links.

How about links to that page from other locations

That's the issue, I think - no external backlinks at all. We're working on it.

[Selcouth]

I've just had a look through our portfolios PR status, and whilst some websites remain the same, many have seen pagerank decrease. We have seen for the 14th (we are UK based), on one site, a 47% increase in Google traffic (I realise this is only one day, but this is unusual). However, our main keywords for this site have dropped in the organic search listings from number one position to second and third.

Could there have been an update in the algorithmic search index to coincide with this PR update, and is it possible that Google have decided to score single pages on merit, rather than whole sites?