Page Rank Update - April 2008

[Atomic]

I'm seeing PR updated where I am. Anyone else?

[makpie]

About tedster's post serps and PR, I agree 100%, in nowadays first you see serps changes and then PR update.

[Mentat]

I cannot find any PR check tools that will work.

[fishfinger]

That's because Google has blocked most (if not all) that ping toolbarqueries.google.com - they did this last year.

[Marvin Hlavac]

My 6 months old forum just went up to PR4 - it was PR3 a couple of hours ago. I hope it will stay at PR4 :-)

My back-links in the Google toolbar dropped from 80 down to 45.

Some pages, which recently changed their titles/URLs, have PR0. Should I do something to address this, or the time will take care of this?

[edited by: Marvin_Hlavac at 12:46 pm (utc) on April 30, 2008]

[billnad]

Interestingly I started a site last week and it has a page rank of 3 on the index page. On this site I have only one incoming link and maybe 10 pages.

Sorry, have to take that back. White empty bar, at least it is not grey :)

[indias next no1]

my toolbar again showing PR 4, but i don't hope it will be in PR4 , may be again come back to PR 3

[MadeWillis]

No changes in PR for my site yet, but two competitors with tons of spammy (paid for) backlinks now have PR 5 - one site is less than a year old.

[Asia_Expat]

The root domain on my squeaky clean white hat website has gone grey bar.

[Lorel]

I see changes on several sites I manage now, all but one went up. It must be the tool I use isn't as up to day as normal serps.

[netmeg]

No changes here, except that an alias for a page (that I installed to encourage sitelinks) finally picked up that page's PR3. I did notice an increase in backlinks in my GWT account though. Maybe next time.

[manca]

Yeah I am definitely seeing changes.... Some of my domains are back to PR where they were couple updates ago :) They are usually up by one or two.

Nice to see this update happening...

[stiffpicken]

my site dropped 1 ... from PR 7 to PR 6 ... in april we saw about the same voluem of traffic from Google that we saw in march

[pontifex]

my values on my main site make no sense at all. high ranking pages are grey, traffic is up... some deep pages have 5 and that whole update really looks like a disconnected world with no relevance to the SERP positions!

P!

[Marcia]

It seems like there's been a random thing for a while where some pages/directories will show PR0 or a grey toolbar for no apparent reason. I've been wondering if it might have something to do with the number of external and/or location of internal links to pages or sections.

[DannyTweb]

We still continue to show a zero PR for no apparent reason.

[edited by: DannyTweb at 1:48 am (utc) on May 1, 2008]

[edd1]

Is anyone outside the US seeing updated pagerank. I haven't seen anything at all. Maybe it's in the early stages?

[GrendelKhan TSU]

yup. I'm in Korea, and like I said, I got pwned for the worse. :( sigh

[Bewenched]

Wheee ... we went up a point. We got tossed 2 years ago with big daddy and we've finally gained back one of the points we lost. Thanks goog!

[GrendelKhan TSU]

man, I'm the only one that went backwards. :(

weird...very white hat about stuff and had tons more good content and links. sigh

[kbba04527]

Can anyone give a quick insight ibnto why my domain PR has stayed the same, but the nromal pages including my default.asp page now have grey PR bars..

Is it a waiting game (i.e. iv lost the PR) or just the usual approach for google?

[tedster]

Gray bar means "no data" is being reported - and there's a kind of gray bar disease reaching pandemic proportions in recent weeks. So do not overreact to graybar PR, especially if the page is getting search traffic.

PR reports are really crazy right now. Different tools are giving very different answers for the same url. Today I saw one url get a PR10 with one tool, a PR5 with another, and a gray bar with the IE Google toolbar. With that kind of wonky PR data, it's time to focus on something else.

[edited by: tedster at 3:07 pm (utc) on May 1, 2008]

[kbba04527]

Much Appreciated Response. Cheers Tedster

[xealinc]

Tedster, thanks for the welcome to the forum. I'm a paid subscriber and I've been reading here for some time, but I've never posted until now.

However, all those issues I mentioned the other day have magically fixed themselves. Primary site now has a PR of 6, missing listings are magically showing up again, and other PR's are back to normal or higher too.

Think about the meaning of the word magic.

[seo_pg]

Has any one notice a dramatic change in their backlink count using the "link" search operator with this new PR change?

For one of my sites the PR stay the same but google is now only reporting only 2 backlinks. Doesn't make sense!

[tedster]

Sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We may quibble over the word "advanced", but given Google's complexity, it is sometimes beginning to feel like a kind of magic.

seo_pg: The link: operator never shows anything but a "sampling" of known backlinks. It goes up and down with no discrenable pattern and is pretty much only good for entertainment purposes. For more about that see our Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

[hazardtomyself]

Our 7 year old site which has been a solid PR 5 for six years is now a PR 4. Our rankings are no different. We rank at and toward the top of very competitive search terms. Have not WebmasterWorld participants pretty much determined that PR is not indicative of what we all value the most... high rankings?

[tedster]

Have not WebmasterWorld participants pretty much determined that PR is not indicative of what we all value the most... high rankings?

I'd say PR is still one of the weightier items in the algo, but it's only one out of hundreds. So what if you see your PageRank fall - or even apparently stay the same? Here are some factors that can play into the green pixels you see:

1. Toolbar PageRank is a continuous scale, not eleven discrete levels from zero to ten.

2. As more and more pages come on the web to "split up the P{ageRank pie", any page that isn't gaining more backlinks will slide down that continuous PR scale, sometimes over the breakpoint and into the next lowest number.

3. The toolbar is only updated about 4 times a year, and not continually the way "real" PR is. Even at update time, we're seeing a historical snapshot, not realtime values.

4. It appears that Google can demote toolbar PR even though "real " PR still gets sent by the page at previous levels. This would be a kind of "public relations" PageRank number - PRPR if you will - apparently used in recent months to sfire a warning shot at websites who are selling/buying links.

5. Some links from sellers and buyers have been devalued for real, and not just on the toolbar. Even if you are not directly involved with these sites, you may be one or two links away from them, and less PR is being sent down that chain of links.

6. Any actions that Google takes to stop or limit link juice from passing out of certain sites/pages/links will cause the same kind of ripple efect to flow to all "dwonstream" urls.

7. Any site adding a nofollow attribute to their links upstream from you, even by several clicks, will also have a lowering effect on your PR.

8. For whatever reason, a gray PR toolbar (no data) is spreading around, especially for internal pages. Sometimes it seems clear that these pages rank very well for certain searches anyway. Not sure what to make of that, but it should be mentiioned.

[Patrick Taylor]

As more and more pages come on the web to "split up the PageRank pie", any page that isn't gaining more backlinks will slide down that continuous PR scale, sometimes over the breakpoint and into the next lowest number.

Ted, is that strictly true? Don't those more and more pages add to the PageRank pie?

[Bones]

I'd say PR is still one of the weightier items in the algo...

Tedster, in Google Webmaster Tools the PageRank info is categorised under "Crawl Stats". So... would you say it's fair to assume that these days PR plays a more important part in indexing rather than ranking?

[santapaws]

Ted, is that strictly true? Don't those more and more pages add to the PageRank pie?

he's saying a pie is a fixed size, so more slices mean each slice is smaller!