Are PR Updates and Ranking Correlated?

[member22]

Can someone confirm that PR updates and changes in rankings of webpages are related... I know some of you on this forum will say that google updates its ranking constantly but I don't agree...

I would say that google is able to craw a website everyday ( according to the score of your page and its popularity ) and index those in it index very quickly but that to rank webpages ( saying you are going to be number 1 or number 10 versus x,y.z pages ) it takes months ... ( between 3 and 6 months ) and my feeling is that this occurs around the time their PR update is done ...

Has someone done some test or would agree with that ?

[tedster]

The answer is no. Updates of visible PR do not correlate with ranking changes. In any particular case, there might be a coincidence, but that's all it as - a coincidence,

PR is updated behind the scenes continually (every day or better!) and of course those publicly invisible changes do affect rankings. However, publicly exported PR changes only happen every once in a while (maybe four times a year.) Those new numbers simply reflect what ALREADY happened behind the scenes, during the recent few months since the last time PR data was exported.

[member22]

So that means that if I add links or makes changes to my website today I might seems changes 2 weeks from now in my ranking as well as 6 months from now... ( in other words before or after the next PR update ) and there is no way to know because it google secret sauce...

[realmaverick]

Example:

Your website is page rank zero. You then build 100 high quality links to your website and notice an increase in traffic over the next few months, despite your public page rank still being zero.

Once Google refreshes it's public page rank, you may have a page rank of 3. But you'll not notice any sudden increase in traffic, ranks or anything else.

Because that page rank was already achieved, it just wasn't visible in the tool bar.

Don't worry about page rank, just focus on creating quality content and building quality links to the content.

[Shaddows]

Also, PR is one of many factors. And the raw TBPR (and indeed the real PR as originally conceived - Random Vs Reasonable Surfer) is a pretty weak prediction of Rank.

Finally this:

I would say that google is able to craw a website everyday ( according to the score of your page and its popularity ) and index those in it index very quickly but that to rank webpages ( saying you are going to be number 1 or number 10 versus x,y.z pages ) it takes months

That is as wrong as wrong can be.

Ranking (the putting in order bit) takes the time displayed on results. It's an on-the-fly calculation taken from the scoring criteria as it applies to the specific search term submitted.

Originally, everthing Google did was batched. Big Daddy allowed some stuff to be realtime, but the clever stuff was still batched.

Caffeine allows most data to be updated (indexed) in realtime. Note that this does not mean a change instantly affects rankings. Google punishes "fiddling" in sensitive areas, particularly the Title attribute. Sometimes a new link, or new content, takes a while to be fully reflected in the scoring, simply because that is how the score-value is calculated.

This time-specific dampening works both ways- some things get more valuable over time, other things less valuable.

[tedster]

Nicely explained, Shaddows. I might have tried, but I would probably have used too many words ;)

If you hope to cope with Google SEO today, you've at least got to get up to speed with the changes they made over the past five years. Certainly Caffeine is one of those major changes.

[martinibuster]

The toolbar PR has generally been a snapshot taken several weeks earlier from the date it was ported to the toolbar. We know this because some who had added links before the snapshot had those links counted for the new Toolbar PR. While those who had increased their links past the date of the snapshot did not show a change. So in some of the older toolbar update threads it was possible to triangulate dates when links were added to come up with an estimated range of when the snapshot occurred.

I don't follow the toolbar udpate threads anymore so I don't know what the time difference is between the snapshot and what is shown on the toolbar. But regardless of the exact timing between the snapshot and the update, the experience in the past has made it evident that the snapshot is generally something that happened in the past and could not be related to any coincidental ranking changes at the time the snapshot is eventually ported to the toolbar. What's on the toolbar is just a snapshot of the state of the toolbar at a specific date. While the ranking updates are on a different schedule.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the PR the Googlers review is known as Internal PR. It's a metric that only they have and this is what is understood to be constantly fluctuating and affecting ranking changes. The toolbar PR is something else entirely.

[MacLovin]

Member22, Sadly you are wrong with disagreeing, depending on your site depends on your PR updates.

Take Twitter as a prime example, make a twitter account and wait 1month... at the end of the month it'll either be NA or Rank 0, now make another account and make about 20 links to that twitter account your soon have 1-2 Rankings.

Now, here's what I'm lend to believe and you really need to ask people who make sites in the masses rather than just have one site as they won't see the changes on the big scale but here's what I've noticed.

There are 2 updates to PR ranks, one is constant and one is intervals, so lets call this BIG and SMALL.

The SMALL update is constant and will update PAGE Ranks from links to those pages, those pages will also inherit juice from the main domain, THEY WILL NOT HOWEVER inherit juice from other pages.

During the small updates which again are constant the DOMAIN receives NO JUICE from the linking of other pages nor does it receive any PR updates to just the ROOT domain!

During the BIG UPDATE! all juice on everything single page is passed to though each other and to the domain! you then have a higher domain rank, therefor your other pages depending how many you have will start to get a HIGH PR regardless if you have links to them! with this said it depends how much PR you have on the ROOT Domain and PAGES...

Hope this sums it up for you :P