Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Cheers,
Hossam
the worst is that my traffic dropped beginning yesterday about 30%
The two events are not likely to be connected, Christi. The Toolbar PR update was calculated a while ago, and it only reflects a "snapshot" at any rate. Real PR is being continually calculated and updated every day, so any ranking changes related to PR would have already been affecting your site and your friend's.
In my case it is highly unlikely that having my PR6 site banned and having the TBPR update in the same time is just a coincidence.
Moftary, your case doesn't seem like a coincidence to my eye either.
PR is a really weak metric for website health, even weaker than rankings - and rankings are getting weaker in usefulness all the time. For me, PR is a minor diagnostic tool once in a while, and that's about it.
Traffic is the metric that is worth watching IMO, and I understand being upset about a big drop in traffic from Google Search, especially if your previous traffic was well targetted. This isn't the thread to dissect those kinds of issues - but there is plenty of food for thought in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.
So I propose we consider Page Rank watching as a kind of entertainment, like those personality tests that show up in pop culture magazines from time to time. If you get a bad score on one of those but your friends and family haven't complained or left, then you just shrug it off.
But if everyone finds a reason to leave the room whenever you walk in, then you probably want to investigate further, but not because of some pop test in a magazine.
Even if you don't show much PageRank, Google still has 200+ other signals we use in our ranking. It's definitely common to see lower-PageRank sites ranking above higher-PageRank sites--which tends confuses the people who obsess too much about PageRank and who don't focus on other factors that search engines might use to rank pages.
we were expecting to move to a pr5
You really can't "expect" these things. You may be stuck at a pr3 for a year no matter what kind of seemingly high-PR links you may acquire. Sometimes they don't count and you can't really know for sure. Look at some of the earlier posts about how little PageRank really matters when it comes to rankings (Tedster et al.)
Just some friendly advice and don't obsess over it. :)
but I highly doubt that this is a regular snapshot of the already calculated real PR.
Page Rank is like a photo taken in the past. Just like Tedster says, it is simply a snapshot of what the page rank of any given page was at that time when the data was collected for export.
Page Rank is about effect and not cause. A diverse set of quality links pointed at the site creates page rank, not the other way around.
how little PageRank really matters when it comes to rankings
Agreed, but if it doesn’t have much to do with ranking, then what role does it play, or more directly what is it supposed to tell us about the site? What exactly is the PR of a site supposed to reflect? Over time tool bar displayed PR and rankings have become further and further separated. Fundamentally PR is a reflection of links, and back links is an element of ranking which we continue to see as the dominant factor.
Mr. Cutts is telling us;
Google still has 200+ other signals we use in our ranking. It's definitely common to see lower-PageRank sites ranking above higher-PageRank sites--which tends confuses the people who obsess too much about PageRank and who don't focus on other factors that search engines might use to rank pages.
He’s right, but generally speaking sites ranking higher have better looking back link profiles, which should be reflected in higher PR. No?
Or know where I can go to find that info.
He’s right, but generally speaking sites ranking higher have better looking back link profiles, which should be reflected in higher PR. No?
Higher ranking websites don't always have better looking link profiles. Some sites that rank high have good looking profiles, but also have a combination of top notch attributes which meet Google ranking metrics better than a website with, let's say, what we would deem a 'better' link profile. This is why overall page rank, as Matt explains it, is only part of the picture.
More and more, it seems that other metrics will begin to take parallel precedence in terms of priority in ranking.
However, I do believe that for large websites with many pages, high page rank is an absolutely necessity in order to propagate to the inner page and keep them both fresh and out of the stale index.
Think phrase-based indexing was nothing more than Google Kool-Aid served up as a taste-tempting webmaster refreshment?
Think again.
but now, in just 2 month, it goes down from 6 to 5 and know to 4 !
I'm really disappointed.
My site dropped a point. Backlinks have been going up. No paid links at all (Im cheap). The only theory I have is g is discounting site wide links (I got a few of those).
Someone posted something about pagestuffing. I thought that might affect ranking but why would it affect pr. I thought pr was only about backlinks. But maybe something has changed.
Also I am seeing a lot of people go from 0 to whatever. But people that were at 4 5 or 6 seem to be going down more often than up. Is this what other people see?
For trivia, i could only find 2 PR10 sites: Google and US.gov. The others, W3C, Apple, Wikipedia, Adobe and others gone to PR9.
If one page hits the filter, it seems like the whole site gets put under the filter.
Marcia, It's only a "coming soon" page with nothing but the company name in the title. The site is not penalized or under specific filter, it's totally banned.
Try this, uninstall your Google Toolbar for 30 days. I did and you know what, it really didn't have that much of an effect on me. In fact, the only time I really look at that thing is when people start talk about updates. ;)
So tell me, what happens when you come across a quality site but it only has PR1 or PR2? Or wait, what if it had PR0. What's that tell you? ;)
The strangest thing is two months ago I started a wordpress blog when I was diagnosed as being diabetic so that I could log blood sugar levels together with food and drink consumed so that I can track the effect of foods on my blood sugar levels.
I maintain this almost everyday. I haven't linked any sites to it from anywhere and haven't noticed any sites linking to it. Usually one or two people find it somehow by searching Wordpress. I logged in today and it's a PR3.
I know that PR probably doesn't account for much these days, but is Google giving it away for free now?
[edited by: tedster at 5:22 pm (utc) on Sep. 28, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
I know that PR probably doesn't account for much these days, but is Google giving it away for free now?
I've seen that kind of thing a good bit on what you might call "backwater" web sites - and not just with this recent PR update, either. Google takes a few different actions to help the "little site" have a chance to show up in the SERPs.
1) the value of backlinks can decline with age
2) more links may have been added to the authority page, and that brings the value of each link down
3) your page may have been just over the edge of PR6, and with more pages on the web, it's now just below the dicinding line.
In your case the authority site might went down from PR7.99 to PR7.01, toolbar would still show it as PR7, so the PR juice passed to your site would be less.
As for dropping from PR6 to PR5 it might confirm my opinion for the web going minus one (or, again, a fraction of one) PR because of the usual stretching and flexing of total PR as the web grows as tedster mentioned.
I thought pr was purely a number that dealt with backlinks to a site. The more backlinks the higher the pr.
Is that no longer true (or was it never true). How is a backwater blog with no incoming links getting a pr3. Is internal linking doing that or is g saying you have great original content here is a pr 3 for your work?
I would think g instead would rank that site high in the serps but not give them a high pr.
I thought pr was purely a number that dealt with backlinks to a site. The more backlinks the higher the pr.
How is a backwater blog with no incoming links getting a pr3?
Is internal linking doing that or is g saying you have great original content here is a pr 3 for your work?
