Google PR Update

[indigojo]

I'm seeing a PR update across some major sites, I'm viewing from Australia, looks like a drop across the board

[Silent_Bob]

I'm finding what someone said earlier to be true - none of my backlinks on pages titled links.htm, keyword-links.htm etc.. are showing now.

[billygg]

im telling ya, i think google is dropping links to pages named link. . our company has over 400 websites, and every site that has a links page, with correlating links in the page name, have lost value. i will follow that link and do a backlink check, and they are gone. google is dropping links, if your site has good links from other sites, that are not on link pages, then u should be fine, but if your site is linked to with a bunch of link pages, or linking farms, ur gonna get hit hard, it seems this way by looking at the sites my compnay owns, im making changes as i type, hehe :)

[Silent_Bob]

To be honest, I dont think its all that bad an idea either. It certainly sorts the sites that people link to because they are good and important from the ones that just solicit reciprocal links because they know it will increase their rankings. My site sits somewhere in the middle of the two - we have quite a few reciprocal links on link pages, but we also have some very good links from authority sites.

[MrOwen]

I don't agree with the term "links" being a negative term when it comes to a page name. If the link is from a relevant site then it will count no matter if it's on a links page or not. I've seen plenty of examples of this and have links counting as backlinks from "links" pages as long as they are on relevant content pages.

Also, we have a new site that is just beginning to see PR for the first time. When checking the SERPS it showed up on page 10 for a major keyword, but is now gone, so I think we are in Dance mode, it just doesn't look like to old dance. I think Google wanted to eliminate the huge change in results that was normally associated with the old dance as it frustrated users.

<edit: No Tools Please [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: ciml at 6:43 pm (utc) on April 23, 2004]

[seo_guy]

I have a question for you all. I was discussing this "sandbox effect" with a colleague and he seems to be under the impression that backlinks and PR although reported 1-2 updates after recieved are not counted until 3-4 months later.

This is pretty consistent with an observation I made, I did some SEO for a company with a PR 8 site and 400,000 pages and they were gratious enough to give me a backlink in the footer of every one of their pages.

That page now shows 22,500 backlinks from the one domain but the KW I requested they place did not increase in rank in the slightest. Mind you I was already #2 for it but I honestly saw no benefit on peripheral terms either.

Whats the deal with this sandbox effect? Is it true? Anyone know where I can read more about it?
Thanks Guys

<edit: No Tools Please [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: ciml at 6:43 pm (utc) on April 23, 2004]

[Marval]

For those asking about how to see the PR associated with the backlinks changes - open your hosts file - located under windows/system32/drivers/etc - and add a line:
64.233.161.98 toolbarqueries.google.com

then restart the browser - that will cause the PR to be shown from that datacenter

As far as the link/links.html pages - hogwash
I added pages to an existing site within the last two weeks and every one of them was named links or some variety - and every one of them counts as backlinks to other sites and internal backlinks with this update - and the pages have good PR already. Some are reciprocal as well, and others are not - all ranking just as well so I would look elsewhere for reasons - or just remember that Google might not have spidered the links for some reason

[paybacksa]

I would doubt that the filename "links" would be used to drop links pages, but I would not be surprised if the community distribution of the links on the page (e.g. the thematic clustering of the websites linked to) was indeed examined and used to determine whether the page should be counted as backlinks or not. Seems to be more of Google's style to do it that way.

In other words a page full of reciprocal links to various otherwise unrelated (thematically) sites might get discounted, whle a links.html page on a widgets site that linked to a bunch of pages thematically relevant to the widgets industry wouldbe kept and counted.

Experiment by splitting links.html into links1.html and links2.html, where links2.html is routine reciprocal links,and links1.html is bonafide community links of interest to your readership. Watch and see if either page gets discounted....

[djgreg]

has anybody an idea if links from the google directory count as normal backlinks?
As mentioned above, dmoz has now PR9, so my category also has one PR point less. But the same category in the google directory has a higher PR because directory-google-com has PR10.
So the PR of my site should be PR(of google-dir) - 1?
But it is PR(dmot-cat) - 1.

So for meit seems that google-direcory links do not count for PR. The site is ín the directory since 2 years, so ot can't be related to indexing or anything.

greg

[Silent_Bob]

Just looked at www2 and www3 and i'm not liking what I'm seeing. I'm down to 22 links now. I hope that the datacentre mentioned on page 1 is the final version. I've lost all my good links (not reciprocal or on links pages) on the www2/3 results.

[JoeyBall]

Haven't we had about 3 pr and link updates. Will we not see a change in google algo anymore.

[Iguana]

Silent_Bob

I just checked a few sites with my historical record and www3 is showing the exact same backlinks as before the April 8 backlink update - looks like old data on that server

[Silent_Bob]

I sure hope so. Very nasty looking, for me at least. Thanks for that info.

[thumpcyc]

The G datacenters never truley settled down after the backlinks & PR update earlier this month, several times a day, I would see differences between the backlinks on the datacenters.

Perhaps G is attempting to finish a failed backlink update. Perhaps not.

Thumpcyc

[steveb]

There are now three sets of backlinks on the various datacenters so expect all sorts of posts about phantom PR and backlink movements and that sort of thing.

[steveb]

One well known site that has suffered from the "slow death" url only thing shows their backlinks going from 45,000 to 392,000, which jibes with comments that a lot of sites are recovering from that.

[cbpayne]

On one of my sites I have a links.htm page (PR5) - it links to 16 other sites. I just went now to check the backlinks of those 16. My site shows up as a backlink to 10 of them (interestingly, the 6 it does not show up as a backlink generally have a lower PR themselves than the 10 it does show up on).

Google discounting links.htm pages is just another myth doing the rounds and needs to be put to bed.

[steveb]

Gee ten whole links, excellent non-research there. The links.htm phenomenon has been demonstrated beyond any rational doubt. Examining ten links while ignoring thousands is plain foolish.

There may be plenty of factors in play that allow a links.tld page to appear as a backlink occasionally, but they usually do not show when they should. Time to move on please, this is eight months old now.

[google.com...]

[vrtlw]

Gee ten whole links,

Steveb are you getting cynical or is your humour getting drier by the day. Must say I really noticed this in the last few days!

[chrisnrae]

"phantom PR"

Yea, it has been coming in and out for me (without updating my hosts file) since last night. I feel like an animal who senses something is wrong in regards to google lately LOL. ;)

[Silent_Bob]

www2 and www3 are back to normal. The links on the datacentre posted on page 1 of this thead are certainly more up to date, but dont seem to be sticking - not yet anyway.

[Hollywood]

"Google discounting links.htm pages is just another myth doing the rounds and needs to be put to bed."

I agree as of today!

- Hollywood

[le_gber]

Reciprocal links form all my sites (customers' site linking to mine and being in my portfolio with a link to theirs) seem to have disapeared from the SERP on the 64.233.161.98 for the search link:www.thedomainname.com. No changes in PR though - I think.

My DMOZ link also disapeared (although the category is still a PR4) and, you guesed it, I link to DMOZ from one of my pages.

Anybody seeing something similar with their site?

Leo

[steveb]

I'm seeing less PR4 pages showing as backlinks across the board (nothing to do with reciprocality).

[Pimpernel]

You know what could yet be the most amazing thing about this update?

Google is showing no indented "second results". This is pretty important because it means 10 different sites can be in the first page now compared to frequently just 5 previously with each having two listings.

Anyone agree, or am I going truly mad?

[steveb]

"am I going truly mad?"

Plenty of indented results still showing.

[Pimpernel]

Ah, I see what it is. If you change your prefernces to view 100 results at a time you see more indented results. When I visited 64.233.161.98 it showed just 10 at a time as it did not recognise my preferences. So I changed my prefernces at google.com back to 10 and suddenly less indenting!

Something worth noting for all those with prefernces set to 100.

[zafile]

"Google is showing no indented 'second results'".

Truly interesting observation. I monitor the search phrase "my country real estate". The Top 40 has no indented 'second results'.

It's a nicer way to show results.

[More Traffic Please]

Truly interesting observation. I monitor the search phrase "my country real estate". The Top 40 has no indented 'second results'.

I have a real estate site with 13 community names followed by real estate as KW phrases. For the first time ever, I have 13 first page indents (with preferences set to 10 results per page). From my perspective, Google has gone indent crazy.

[Pimpernel]

MoreTrafficPlease

Are you talking about the results on the IP address quoted or the results on google.com?

[More Traffic Please]

I first noticed it on the IP Marcia quoted on page 1 of this thread. I now am seeing the same thing on google.com.