Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
- sometimes it just doesn't update
- it relates to URL's that have not yet indexed
- it relates to a spam sites that are out of google's main index for infringing guidelines
- it relates to supplementary pages
Actually - what do we really know ?
[edited by: MadeWillis at 5:17 pm (utc) on Sep. 30, 2008]
Fact: The TBPR shown is NOT necessarily the real PR of any page at any given time.
Fact: Many graybar pages one quarter will show PR the next quarter with zero changes to the site or pages.
Fact: Many pages that show a TBPR of 3 or 4 one quarter could be gray the next and bounce back to the original 3 or 4 PR the next quarter with no changes to the site structure or pages involved.
Fact: TBPR is as broken as the back link operator Google feeds you when you check back links.
Fact: The day TBPR shows an update the data used is 3 to 4 months old all ready.
Fact: The TBPR shown is NOT necessarily the real PR of any page at any given time.
Fact: Many graybar pages one quarter will show PR the next quarter with zero changes to the site or pages.
Fact: Many pages that show a TBPR of 3 or 4 one quarter could be gray the next and bounce back to the original 3 or 4 PR the next quarter with no changes to the site structure or pages involved.
Fact: TBPR is as broken as the back link operator Google feeds you when you check back links.
no way is the tbpr 4 months out of date, its weeks not months.
I wonder what you mean by real pr. Perhaps you mean pure raw page rank as it was in its very early days in which case i think you mean its not old the old formula for pr. Or maybe you mean its nothing to with the pr that is applied to your page for ranking purposes, well i would disagree, its just not the same figure for all pages because as was said, its indicative of other factors when it hits the toolbar.
Yes its goes grey and normal again because the signals they were reacting to have changed which might not even be onsite, or their own parameters have changed, or you was on a threshold that can easily shift either side at any one moment, and tbpr is a snapshot.
TBPR is not broken at all. The backlinks is not broken either, its been de seo-usefulised.
Thank you for your facts. :)
Fact: TBPR is as broken as the back link operator Google feeds you when you check back links.
Yup, Google is very much into a concerted program of disinformation, and you know what? It works, this distorted bad data they put forth definitely makes things more challenging on the seo front.
In some ways it looks like Google is using toolbar PageRank as a way of communicating (somewhat veiled) messages about pages.
Do you have any thoughts on what those messages might be ?
It sounds from the discussion like Google's so bent on war with a profession that they're going off track of their mission to provide people with useful information, and there are reasons besides SEO to want to know who's linking to you. That seems nonsensical for a company whose reputation was built on helping people find useful information easier and I just have a hard time buying it.
I've noticed that the webmaster console still shows thousands of backlinks. I've always thought that the TBPR was delayed but in my case it seems to have been delayed for 5 months! At least since my site was dumped.
Another thing that confuses me is that I always though that TBPR was a plain indication of the power and number of other pages which link to you. Even if my site is severely penalized wouldn't the PR still be the same? All the links from other pages are still there.
Toolbar PR can change and even become grey with no impact on performance.Good to know, cause the Toolbar goes gray for my fairly new site every other week.
In some ways it looks like Google is using toolbar PageRank as a way of communicating (somewhat veiled) messages about pages.Do you have any thoughts on what those messages might be ?
Generally, I've seen gray Toolbars on pages that look like directory-style pages that are heavy on links and light on other text.
I've been thinking that the message might be that the page has been algorithmically flagged as looking like the kind of page that might be selling links. If this is the message, it would be directed both to the potential link buyer (to fuzz up what the TBPR of the page is) and to the potential link seller (as a note that Google is watching this page).
It's likely that pages with grayed Toolbars end up getting hand checks... something that would be interesting to monitor.
The grey bar in my mind is simply another glitch inherent in the bar, since I have had lots of pages that were grey bar and ranked fine (and still do)
Haven't gone and and ever checked to see if those eventually got page rank.
Generally, I've seen gray Toolbars on pages that look like directory-style pages that are heavy on links and light on other text.
If I do a search on Google Gadgets CSE for a keyword that appears on every page of the site, it only returns pages in the CSE results that are not grey bar.
If I look at Google WMT, at the Internal Links report, the list of URLs that have incoming links is (near enough) only those that are not grey barred.
If I do a search on Google Gadgets CSE for a keyword that appears on every page of the site, it only returns pages in the CSE results that are not grey bar.
Fact: The day TBPR shows an update the data used is 3 to 4 months old all ready.
That is not a fact. A lot of people say it, but it is still not the case on day one of the TBPR update.
I can show you one new domain that was turned on days before the PR update and it is PR3. Another that was about 1.5 months old and it has PR2. (Both are .com.au in case the behaviour is different for ccTLDs.)
Few facts about your site or its ranking, but perhaps a warning, or an indication of trends.
PR > Gray 'tends' to be bad news, or at least a warning.
Yes, it could be that your server was out when the spider visited, or maybe Google has just noticed that most of your meta descriptions are identical or missing - neither would be the end of the world, and indeed your serps may be unchanged.
But at the other extreme, it could be that your pages have lost value as a result of joining a bad neighborhood, or have seriously transgressed in another way.
Or the page may be too new.
In most cases, gray means nothing taken alone; you need to look at it with knowledge of the page's Google history, and its age. And weigh all of that against any changes you have made or authorised that could have affected that page.
But simply looking at the gray bar, without context, is usually pretty unhelpful.
I see some gray bars for some of my pages when I use IE, but if I use Firefox I see green bars on those same pages.
Could the browser itself have a bug of some sort?
[edited by: MadeWillis at 8:19 pm (utc) on Oct. 8, 2008]
How about old sites with tons of organic inbound links, that get suddenley downgraded from PR 4 to PR 0 ?
"Tons" is the clue. Perhaps they were sitewide links somewhere and that site has removed the links. Perhaps they were forum signatures and old posts have been archived/removed.
If they were tons of unique links from individual sites, it's an algo catching up with a particular linking practice. For example, a thin affiliate site with a thousand IBLs is "probably" a self-initiated linking pattern.
Slowly, Google seems to be catching up with abnormal linking patterns.
Does Vista use the HOSTS file in a different way? There is no difference in display whatever IP I use. I can put any IP in there, even 1.2.3.4, and the toolbar carries on showing the same data; some green, some grey.
...directory-style pages that are heavy on links and light on other text.
I did a quick follow-up on this, checking pages on sites I'd worked on that fit this description. About half were gray-barred, and these sites had no other gray-bar pages.
I have seen cases where such phenomena causing inner pages that are not linked from homepage nor externally having graybar.
My information site has been up since 1998, with a lot of original articles. We have stopped accepting article contributions from others about 2-3 years ago. The highest pagerank of the site was PR 7, then went down to PR 6 for several years. The last update the site was down to PR 5 -- and this coincided with a ballooning of the number of duplicate title and description in GWT (mostly because articles have 3-5 pages and we would give all pages the same titles, plus a few inadvertent mistakes in not changing the title of the article). The site was hit during Update Jagger where we lost 80% of traffic when we were freely linking to any sites that will link to us (we removed all links and the site recovered its traffic after 3 months)
Some of our pages have gray toolbar (both in IE and Firefox) -- and what puzzles me is that these are original quality articles. No keyword stuffing, and most do not even have duplicate titles or metatags. These articles don't show up in Google at all even if searching for the exact title. We do have a significant copying problem, where our articles end up in blogs and other websites without our permission.
Traffic from Google is up, though I am worried that
(a) we are not maximizing traffic potential given that some pages are out in Google;
(b) possibility that somewhere down the road traffic to the site will fall.
Any advice? Thanks
