PR Update 27 June 2011

[Truetraveller]

Google did a page rank update this morning without a doubt. My site just went from PR0 to PR3..

[edited by: goodroi at 4:06 pm (utc) on Jun 27, 2011]
[edit reason] Please no specific urls [/edit]

[jdancing]

Unless you sell links based on it, TBPR means nothing - at best it is for entertainment purposes only, at worst it is a red herring to keep the link selling and trading business off balance.

Only Google knows your site's real PR and they'll never give that information out.

Traffic and rankings are what matter.

[bwnbwn]

This is how important I put on PR. I saw the update this AM did a look here didn't see it did a search on the net didn't see it and let someone else report it because I don't put a bit of stock in PR, and needed to catch up from being gone a week.

BTW I didn't spend but about 20 minutes on my computer in a week it was great. :)

[randle]

it is a red herring to keep the link selling and trading business off balance.

Thats the bottom line, its bad information and the worst thing you can do is make decisions from it. Dont let Google make a marionette out of you.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Hah, it looks like all WebmasterWorld profiles are showing up as N/A now.

[graeme_p]

Front page PR down.

Other pages mostly seem unaffected.

Traffic from Google up about 50% on a year ago.

My new site with little search traffic, very few incoming links has the same front page PR as the established site.

Why does PR matter to me? I agree its a red herring.

[paulguy]

0 to 4. Woo hoo!

[jeyKay]

Confirmed, Canada.

1 to 4....what a beautiful thing to see.

[bhartzer]

Woo Hoo, PR is up now. Now I can go sell some text links. (NOT).

[kidder]

I'm not sure how they calculate the TBR rank these days, my better higher profile websites remained unchanged while a others moved up and down... Odd. On to things important we are looking at some healthy traffic numbers and revenue today so who gives a rats about the toolbar reading. :)

[koan]

realmaverick, I'm not sure why you make such a big deal out of the toolbar PR. Just uninstall (I did) and it'll be out of your mind. The only thing that matters, traffic, is found in your analytics program. I have sites with decent PR yet they're trashed by Panda, so why would I care about a little green bar on some toolbar. I'm still bleeding money.

[vphoner]

This is weird, last week, mid-week, my traffic went down 99%. What I was ranking #1 on keywords is now 60 to 70 back (page 6 and 7). And today my pagerank goes from 3 to 5. Go figure. I still can't understand such a drop in traffic. Two months ago, panda 2.1 gave me an 80% drop, but the traffic returned to full strength in 3 weeks. I hope the same happens this time, but the ranking of page 6 and 7 and 99% drop in traffic is very severe. Any clue into this? A mistake by google again?

[Andem]

>> Any clue into this? A mistake by google again?

I'm almost sure this is a mistake by Google. For one thing, Google.com itself is now a PR9. If there's one site in the world that really should be PR10, it's Google. I can't imagine another site linked to more often from such a diverse set of high-PR and low-PR sites.

Second, a little experiment site I've been running for 1 1/2 months now has PR5 with very little backlinks and they're rubbish, most if not all of which are from those search engine scrapers. Another site I know dropped, which makes no mathematical sense unless several thousand linking sites were down last time Google crawled and Gbot somehow forgot about their link weight.

[wheel]

Toolbar page rank is an indicator of volume of page rank of backlinks. It's only correlated with ranking as much as volume of backlinks is correlated with ranking. It doesn't take into account any of the myriad of other factors about backlinks that DO count towards your ranking.

Moral, volume of backlinks doesn't necessarily help your rankings that much.

[tedster]

Number of linking domains seems to have a higher correlation than raw numbers of backlinks. When i'm crunching out competitive studies, I always focus on linking domains.

[Errioxa]

Increasing the number of URLs that Google processed to calculate the TBPR, the value passed to each URL will be smaller, and consequently every time is more difficult to increase the PR to any site. I heard some years ago a mathematician, he knew exactly what he said about PR algorithm.

[vphoner]

I'm almost sure this is a mistake by Google. For one thing, Google.com itself is now a PR9. If there's one site in the world that really should be PR10

Ok, I checked yahoo, and its a PR9. But facebook is a PR10. Maybe facebook is now the kind of PR rank and that demotes both Google and Yahoo. Just a thought.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Maybe facebook is now the kind of PR rank

If all their javascripts on remote sites for 'likes' and comments counted as votes, it'd be easy to see why.

However, backlink tools such as 'Open Site Explorer' do report google having many more links (and linking domains) to the .com versions of Google rather than Facebook.

[trakkerguy]

Some of my higher PRs went down, lower ones went up. No big deal.

But, there was a PR9 for sale on the auction site. See it dropped to PR8 - sellers' gotta be bummed about that. He was trying to end the auction yesterday, almost like he knew the update was coming...

[tedster]

Increasing the number of URLs that Google processed to calculate the TBPR, the value passed to each URL will be smaller, and consequently every time is more difficult to increase the PR to any site.

You've got it, Errioxa. A PR7 home page from a couple years ago might only be a PR5 today, assuming it just "kept pace" with other sites rather than enjoying dramatic growth.

[SevenCubed]

One thing I've noticed over the years too is that PR is only has high as it needs to be in relation to the sites competing on its heels. In other words you may have a site that was a PR9 for many years and you did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to it but all of a sudden it drops a notch. It's typically because your closest competitors got thrashed thereby leaving you alone on the playing field. As a result Google lowers the bar a bit on the unchanged site to let potential competitors know what high water mark they need to strive for.

The reverse seems to also be true. You may have a site sitting at PR4 and a new competitor comes along in your niche with a solid presentation. They might get assigned a PR3 out of the gate (after 3-6 months) but for different reasons than why your site is at PR4. So the new site might have gained its PR value from a solid technical presentation whereas yours might be due to age and backlinks. Either way, the aged site without making any changes could then receive a boost in PR value once again because of fresh less-trusted competitors on its heels.

PR value is relative and should never be interpreted as the be all and end all for your efforts.

[tootalldave]

My sites we're a PR7 before the Panda update, then dropped to a PR6 until today, they are at PR7 again. So my sites are back in black.
That's assuming the PR update is completed, which i really doubt.

[Nuttakorn]

Google now is 9, Adobe: 9 Twitter: 9, but Facebook is 10!

[benallos]

from 0 to 3 ...

[rannans]

finally got my pr8 after 18 months on 7

[tedster]

nice going rannans. Since PR is somewhat like a logarithmic (exponential) scale, going from 7 to 8 in just 18 months is a very big deal.

[elearner]

Let suppose if PR doesn't have any value then why G takes action against the websites that manipulate PR and involved in buy/sell links?

[tedster]

Real PR has real value - it's essentially a metric for backlink power. Toolbar PR can be deceptive and simplistic. And ranking takes more than PR, so focusing only on PR is foolish.

I've got clients who outrank competitors with ten times their backlinks. Links aren't the big deal they used to be - but they are still a big deal.

[anteck]

AUSTRALIA CONFIRMED. Wide update on a range of sites.

Why are people pissed off about the PR dropping? It's about rankings people, not PR. Unless your PR has value to other people...

[elguiri]

Can't believe we're still discussing this.

[elguiri]

Actually, having Panda, followed by a PR update, reminds me of that episode of Cheers when the bar is losing money, and Rebecca fends off Woody's request for a raise by giving him a title.

"A raise is just money, Sam, but titles are forever!"

Who cares if my traffic just got blown to #%/&!. I got a PR4!