Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My initial reaction was 'so what, big deal' - after all I've seen PR3 sites outrank PR4 sites when competing for the same keywords. Correlation between PR and actual traffic (e.g. by sampling two sites alexa rankings) also seems inconclusive.
When discussing this update, my business partner made an interesting comment though - he surmised that while the increase may not make a difference for competitive keywords (due to human filtered results, authority flags, penalties, etc) it may stand us in good favour for long tail terms. The assumption here being that long tail terms will be ranked purely according to automatic, machine computed rankings where pagerank would be more of a contributing factor and one need not worry about any penalties, filters or any of the other items that Google employs to obscure the ranking algorithm.
What I wanted to do is get anyone's thoughts on the above, we all know that pagerank is not the great make-or-break metric that it once was. The question is whether pagerank increases do actually translate to traffic or something meaningful to a business?
What sort of delay does one normally deal with in this regard?
In your experience, if we rewind back to the point where the PR actually updated - what sort of effects would we have noticed?
The question is whether pagerank increases do actually translate to traffic or something meaningful to a business?
I don't higher page rank ever hurts, but with my sites there isn't whole lot of correlation between what they make, traffic and tool bar page rank. A page rank 3 site with decent traffic on a lucrative topic like weight loss tips is probably going to make a lot more money than a page rank 7 site on an estoreric topic like major religious influences on lesser known 16th century Dutch philosophers.
In your experience, if we rewind back to the point where the PR actually updated - what sort of effects would we have noticed?
AFAIK It's an ongoing update (calculation) they show you a pixelized 'green fairy dust' snap shot of once in a while... Again, AFAIK, there is no 'update time' per se, because it's an ongoing calculation. They show you the calculation at a given point in time, but the calculation is still being performed and the chances of you going from a 5.0 to a 6.0 in a single snapshot update seem unlikely. IMO it's much more likely you went from a 5.49 to a 5.51+. Not a full 'point' of PR...
My initial reaction was 'so what, big deal'
IMO your initial reaction was correct...
And, of course it's PageRank, not SiteRank, so unless your home page (or whatever page you're referring to) will be the one competing for the long-tail terms then it's not even the page you should be concerned with.
AFAIK It's an ongoing update (calculation)
Yes, that's what began happening back when the Big Daddy infrastructure went live in early 2006. Now with year another major infrastructure change called Caffeine, I'm expecting the rolling updates to get even faster and closer to "real time".
As tedster said, the change happened in the past. In the past the snapshot was of the toolbar PR from three to four months prior to when it was ported to the toolbar.
AFAIK It's an ongoing update...
You are referring to Internal PageRank, the real PageRank. We are discussing what is shown on the toolbar, TbPR. Those are two different things. Yes they are related, but they are different.
You are referring to Internal PageRank, the real PageRank. We are discussing what is shown on the toolbar, TbPR. Those are two different things. Yes they are related, but they are different.
Are you saying the TBPR is not a snap-shot of real PR at a given point in the past?
And, if not, then what is it, an estimate or something?
Are you saying the TBPR is not a snap-shot of real PR at a given point in the past?
Correct. TbPR is not an accurate gauge of what the internal PR is. Here is an extreme example. Years ago I had a client whose inner pages were grayed out. The pages were indexed, but the TbPR showed gray. So I contacted someone at Google and was told that the internal PR was fine. Within a month the bug was fixed and the inner pages showed PR.
Another example is how the toolbar doesn't show PR on certain pages that have high link to content ratio. Is internal PR flowing to and out of those pages? We know PR is flowing to those pages. But why is it not showing on the toolbar? There are explanations but that's for another discussion. The point is that we know that PageRank is flowing to those pages and that this fact is not reflected in the toolbar.
Beyond that, real PR is made up of a lot more metrics than are reflected in the ten pixels. This is a fact. The toolbar can not be a snapshot of the real thing, it never was, it has always been a shadow of the real PR, Internal PageRank.
[edited by: martinibuster at 2:45 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2010]
I knew about pages not showing TBPR and also knew real PR was being calculated for the pages even though not showing in the ToolBar, because otherwise the internal calculation system would be broken, but did not realize the TBPR was from a different calculation... I actually thought the 'grey bar' was from data dropping out at some point along the way and wasn't really worried about by G, because the real number was still intact and they probably have better things to do with their time than wonder, or even care, why TBPR does not show for some super low (EG .01) percent of pages on the Internet when it's probably mostly only webmasters who really care about it not showing or have any clue it used to show in the first place...
So as a rule of thumb, a PR of "just above 5" is about six times as strong a page as a PR of "just above 4" - and so on up and down the scale. No, PR 10 is not ten times stronger than PR 1 - it's about six to the ninth power stronger, or about ten million times as strong. And it follows that PR of 5.5 would not be nearly half way to PR 6.0, because the scale is logarithmic.
There are many exceptions going on here in the fine print. For one, Google gives some kind of a "mom and pop" boost to small sites. I've seen pages with a PR 3 on sites that have no backlinks at all - at least none I can discover.
Then there's the fact that Google changed the way they calculate PR several times from the originally published formula - I believe as recently as last year. Of course, the details of the new calculation have not been made public. But from time to time, certain factors do get discussed publicly, such as the infamous "rel=nofollow" change last year.
And the scale is roughly logarithmic, on a base of around 6.
I've heard and always assumed that the PR scale was "kind of" logarithmic but do you know the above to be a fact Ted?
I've seen math analysis that ranged from as low as log base 4 to as high as log base 8. And those were all based on the publicly patented version of PR! PR was originally defined as an iterated process that generates close enough to a log scale for webmaster purposes.
We certainly have all noticed that climbing to the next higher PR value takes a whole lot more link popularity with each and every step.
That's true. It is more difficult to jump to a higher TbPR score. It used to be easier to get a site to PR 6 or 7 in the past.
But here's where the current situation becomes opaque. While the bar for higher TbPR seems to have risen, it has become more difficult to score a higher TbPR, the change does not correlate with the ability to rank better in the SERPs.
What is TbPR measuring? The ability to rank? No, the SERPs testify no. In my opinion, the TbPR is not a measure of the ability to rank.
So if it's not really PageRank, what is it? What is TbPR reflecting?
The amount of links that are relevant to a site, minus links that might have been purchased, minus deprecation of links that might have been reciprocal, minus a deprecation of links that were not relevant, plus an artificial hurdle to make it harder to jump to Toolbar PR 5+ in order to discourage the link trade?
