PR gone schizophrenic

pagerank boincing all day long

[spekiehl]

Anyone else notice their pagerank jumping numbers all day long in the same minute? I know this is because of a difference in datacenters, but all day long? My websites have been jumping from 3 to 5 and back and forth and from 0 to 4 and back to 3. Craziness. Is it at all safe to say that the bigger number is what it will eventually turn out to be?

my new theory on PR these days... I'm guessing that google is just using it to perfect its own formula, so eventually everyone will have a PR of 10, and thus everything you search for will give you perfect results.... hm... it's highly possible for them to do that.

[takagi]

Most likely the bouncing of the PR is caused by different PR values at Google's datacenters. If you add a line like this:

216.239.37.100 toolbarqueries.google.com

to your hosts file, then you can see the PR of one datacenter (in this case www-va.google.com which is now supposed to have the most recent PageRank). The location of the hosts file depends on your OS like

C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

or

c:\windows\hosts

(ignore the 'hosts.sam' file which is just a sample file). After changing that file, close all Internet Explorer (IE) windows and start IE again.

See also: Pagerank instability? Irreproducible results. [webmasterworld.com]