Google Webmaster Tools PageRank vs Toolbar PageRank

[drall]

For some reason in Googles webmaster tools the crawl stats section is now showing a interior page as the highest pagerank page within our website for the month of June.

The homepage has always been pr 7ish and the page they are saying is the highest pagerank is 4.

We havent seen any drops in traffic yet and I was wondering if the site being offline for 50 hours with the whole planet debacle at the beginning of June and then transfering our server/ip may have caused a temporary blip in webmaster tools?

Has anyone seen this happen before?

[Receptional Andy]

The homepage has always been pr 7ish and the page they are saying is the highest pagerank is 4.

I think you have to be slightly careful here, as the toolbar PageRank is not to be relied upon, if it is a reflection of actual PR at all. I'd consider WMT to be a more authoritative resource on PageRank than the toolbar.

So, my suspicion is that the inner page has either 'overtaken' the homepage (which can happen quite naturally as a result of slew of links coming in to a particular area) or the homepage has dropped down (as a result of a problem with the page or the site).

If it's as a result of a temporary problem, the WMT data will also be temporarily out of sync.

If it is as a result of the outage, it's possible that Google revisited the homepage more frequently during your outage (and hence recalculated PR more quickly) whereas inner pages, despite also being unavailable, we're not recalculated and hence end up with a higher PR (albeit temporarily).

If there's no impact on traffic or search performance (particularly for the homepage or inner page in question), then I imagine it may already have resolved itself.

[drall]

Thank you Receptional Andy, this happened about 30 days ago and crawling and serp positions held by the homepage seem to be holding up fine.

So far our traffic hasnt dropped at all, in fact its actually risen since we moved the server to the new host due to the server being far faster then our old machine. As best as I can tell our rankings and crawling and traffic havent been effected negativly yet.

[Receptional Andy]

I would have expected some impact on performance if the true PageRank had genuinely dropped, although tech hiccups are always hard to pin down. The other possibility is that the inner page has genuinely risen in PageRank, but I imagine you'd have seen increased links and activity if this was the case.

My advice would be to keep an eye on it, but I'd be hopeful that you won't see any impact.

It's very difficult to gauge how 'current' WMT PageRank data is, and from that even more difficult to assess what the impact of fluctuations will be on performance.

Of course, this mostly assumes that the difference in WMT and toolbar PR is actually down to the hosting issue, which while somewhat likely, may not truly be cause and effect.

[drall]

It would be very hard for the inner page to outrank the homepage which has around 200k backlinks and the inner page has around 50 backlinks.

No performance drops that I can see,
*homepage gets re cached within hours of being updated
*all rankings and traffic sitewide is intact
*usual heavy crawling from googlebot

I am thinking that your theory in terms of Googlebot hitting our homepage like mad while it was down for 3 days almost caused this. We were down so long we had to reverify with WMT for the site.

Many folks are probably going to say why would you go down that long but we had a legacy cms system on that server and really didnt want to move due to migration issues but in the end we moved to avoid further downtime and ditched the old cms.

Anything else I should watch out for other then what I stated above?

[drall]

I think you are right Receptional Andy and it already resolved itself, that section of the WMT must be at least 30 days behind I think.

[zaqwsx3]

Can the same be said for the sitelinks data in GWT? I see a rather large difference between the "Indexed URLs" count under the Sitemaps section, as compared to a "site:domain" Google search.

[Robert Charlton]

Can the same be said for the sitelinks data in GWT? I see a rather large difference between the "Indexed URLs" count under the Sitemaps section, as compared to a "site:domain" Google search.

zaqwsx3 - To clarify, I assume that this is a typo and that you're not really talking about "Sitelinks" which are something else entirely from the indexed pages returned by the "site:domain" operator.

Sitelinks are those extra links that appear under some #1 results...

Sitelinks Information - a reference thread
[webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:14 am (utc) on July 2, 2008]

[zaqwsx3]

My mistake - not sitelinks at all, but rather the number of pages from your site that are in the Google index. Have found some other discussions on it, and guess the GWT "indexed URLs" figure is seldom updated. Here to hoping that future updates to GWT will present more up to date and relevant data! :)

[webmasterworld.com ]

[drall]

Well Googles WMT has updated again and for the second straight month since the server outage/move WMT says the highest pagerank page for the site is a very low page within the site.

What doesnt make any sense to me is the traffic has actually increased from Google since we moved to a different server yet WMT says that basically the homepage is no longer the highest pr page and pages that should be close to it in pr dont show either and it continues to show pages at the bottom of the website.

Im concerned but totally confused, how could the site basically loose all pr in WMT since the server outage/transfer but actually see a increase in Google traffic and rankings?

I have spent many hours pouring over all the usual stuff and everything checks out perfect with the site, the only glitch seems to be with Googles WMT saying the homepage is no longer the strongest pr page which has been a strong 7 for years and now says a pr 1 page is the strongest page.

Any ideas?

[netmeg]

I have around 160 sites in my GWT for me and my clients, and from what I've seen, that GWT pagerank indicator has been only rarely close to reality over the past four or five months. I dunno if it doesn't get updated, or doesn't sync, or what - in some cases, it lists brand new pages as the highest PR, in some cases it's a buried contact page - I don't even look at it anymore.

[drall]

Thanks Netmeg, you just made me feel a million times better. Ive wasted so much time pouring over server settings and stats and keep coming back to everything is ok on our end this must be a WMT glitch.

Thanks again Netmeg!