Thread: When is google ready to do a pr update

It's not about PR, you can have a low PR page and still rank for your keywords, it's about backlink and Anchor Text. Backlinks always = additional PR but you can always have a high PR page that doesnt rank

Yea I found that out to be true also. Thanks for the advice.

it usually took between 3-6 months for big PR-updates (well at least for those visible via toolbar), small updates are made throughout.

this might also change from region to region. for german websites we had an update in January.

it usually took between 3-6 months for big PR-updates (well at least for those visible via toolbar), small updates are made throughout.

this might also change from region to region. for german websites we had an update in January.

I've seen three of our sites change PR a couple of times this year. In fact our strongest site has dropped from PR5 to PR3 yet doubled it's traffic and is still is as highly ranked for very competitive searches against PR6 sites. The PR is relevant to most important part Google can assess a site for.

Also, 200 backlinks - the best way to check this in google is not count the links but count the domains. If you search for your domain (e.g. "mydoamin.com") and google says there are 22,000 links - try click onto the last page. I have sites with 100,000 links but only 19 pages of domains. A site with 100 links but only 10 domains is not as good as a site with 50 links across 20 domains. It's the number of domains too...!

One thing I've noticed, take a look at a site like calibrationtech.ie - this site has no SEO. It's got a PR of 4/10, it has only 18 domains backlinking - fairly bad on the seo front (I know the company, they dont need SEO!). the fact is, their PR is probably 4/10 because their page Title is "Calibration TEchnology", their domain is "Calibration Tech" - their can't be much competition at all - therefore their domain and keyword is pretty much relevant. If I change their Page Title to "Property for Sale Ireland", I'd say within 3 months the PR would drop to 1. Suddenly in the "Property for sale" index, you can imagine this domain pales in comparison with it's contemporaries.

So if you are launching a new site, my advice is to leave the title, description and keywords open, build the links, wait 3 months for PR of 2 or 3, keep link building (incidentally - you can rank a site for property btw in Ireland without changing the home page title or keywords - I've had to do it where we could modifty the meta-tags) - then give it a page title, description and meta-tags of the competitve keywords. So it will drop, it's much easier to drop from 3 to 2 or 1 on competitive keyphrases than sit with a 0 for 6 months while you struggle to promote it.

Originally Posted by link8r

One thing I've noticed, take a look at a site like calibrationtech.ie - this site has no SEO. It's got a PR of 4/10, it has only 18 domains backlinking - fairly bad on the seo front (I know the company, they dont need SEO!). the fact is, their PR is probably 4/10 because their page Title is "Calibration TEchnology", their domain is "Calibration Tech" - their can't be much competition at all - therefore their domain and keyword is pretty much relevant. If I change their Page Title to "Property for Sale Ireland", I'd say within 3 months the PR would drop to 1. Suddenly in the "Property for sale" index, you can imagine this domain pales in comparison with it's contemporaries.

Pagerank (as per the original paper) has nothing to do with on-page or on-domain factors. Purely a function of the inbound links from other pages. Page title and domain name are query-dependent factors, whereas PR is not. So changing the title would have zero impact on their PR, but would certainly affect their ranking for specific keywords.

Originally Posted by RedCardinal

Pagerank .....Purely a function of the inbound links from other pages. Page title and domain name are query-dependent factors, whereas PR is not. So changing the title would have zero impact on their PR, but would certainly affect their ranking for specific keywords.

PageRank - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hi Richard, I have to disagree strongly, based on first hand evidence where the number of inbound links remains constant but changing the content affects the PageRank - means that on-site changes influence PageRank. Your PR is relative to other sites in the same category/keyword index.

I quote from Wiki

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank. In order to prevent manipulation, spoofing and spamdexing, Google provides no specific details about how other factors influence PageRank.

Search for pagerank category relative - Google Search will show other people agreeing. I do agree the quality of the backlinks and the quantity have the most affect on the value of the PR (i.e. more links from high PR sites = higher PR) but Google still has to read the target page to categorise it.

Originally Posted by link8r

PageRank - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hi Richard, I have to disagree strongly, based on first hand evidence where the number of inbound links remains constant but changing the content affects the PageRank - means that on-site changes influence PageRank. Your PR is relative to other sites in the same category/keyword index.

Sorry - complete rubbish. The category argument fails to realise that sites in one category are more likely to be highly interlinked. Therefore my pagerank will be somewhat dependent on my niche. But only as a third degree effect. There's no evidence that Google is directly using categories for PR computation.

The toolbar logs might be used to find spammy pages, and may well be used in PR calculations (in a negative way), but this is still an off-page signal.

Take care with wikipedia - check out the revision history on that page and you'll quickly see there's a lot of disagreement.

Your example is also flawed - retaining the same backlink profile to a given page does not guarantee a static PR value. PR by it's nature changes as the number of indexed pages changes, and while your page might retain an identical backlink graph, you can not tell how upstream graphs now look. All it takes is for one of your strongest inbound links to lose some of it's backlinks for your page to drop on the next PR export. Given you have to wait ~3 months for another export I can't see how you could have isolated your test? And how can you isolate cause and effect?

I'd strongly recommend you read the original pagerank paper and subsequent patents if you haven't already done so.

Yes I have read it and I also said that this has been changed a lot since then, its always under change. I respect that you have a lot of experience, but seeing as I haven't been sat down by the people who maintain the PR logarithm I certainly wouldn't call anyones post rubbish. While I'm challenging your idea based on the tests I've done, as a person who has no more special priveleges than I do, I certainly would boldly rubbish you.

I quoted Wikipedia because unlike websites owned by someone, the content in Wikipedia is community edited.

I have test this theory by building a site, increasing the PageRank through link building and then changed the page title and keyword information and seen the PR drop within a few months. I've done it time and time again over 20 domains.

For someone who doesn't have access to exactly what Google do, don't you think you've put forward a very strong argument with only your experience to back it up ?

From Google's own website then:

Originally Posted by Google

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

It says the page is ranked by the terms on the page and the votes cast by sites linking to it and what they have to say/what their own PR is. If content wasn't important why does a site with an overall high count of words for "hotel booking" need many more links than a site that has something non-competitive?

You asked how can I scientifically prove this? I have given an example - CalibrationTech has less than 8 domains backlinking. It's PR is 4. If you build a domain for "hotels Dublin" and give it 8 backlinks, it wont get a PR of 4 - it'll be lucky to have a PR of 2 after a year.

PR is directly relevant to category - otherwise you could take any domain with any content with a PR of 8 and assign it to any industry and it would keep the PR. It won't. Saying that AIB's website has a PR of 8 and Daft.ie has a PR of 6 and that it's irrelevant of content means that AIB could rank higher than Daft when you search for property. When you search for Property, AIB doesn't come up....

Originally Posted by link8r

It says the page is ranked by the terms on the page and the votes cast by sites linking to it and what they have to say/what their own PR is. If content wasn't important why does a site with an overall high count of words for "hotel booking" need many more links than a site that has something non-competitive?

I'm not with you at all. Sites in competitive niches generally need more links to rank. That's a function of competition.

Originally Posted by link8r

You asked how can I scientifically prove this? I have given an example - CalibrationTech has less than 8 domains backlinking. It's PR is 4. If you build a domain for "hotels Dublin" and give it 8 backlinks, it wont get a PR of 4 - it'll be lucky to have a PR of 2 after a year.

That would depend on the links. Not all links are equal. And pagerank doesn't just flow from domains, it flows from resources - i.e. pages.

Originally Posted by link8r

PR is directly relevant to category - otherwise you could take any domain with any content with a PR of 8 and assign it to any industry and it would keep the PR. It won't. Saying that AIB's website has a PR of 8 and Daft.ie has a PR of 6 and that it's irrelevant of content means that AIB could rank higher than Daft when you search for property. When you search for Property, AIB doesn't come up....

The reason AIB wont appear for [property] is that it's not relevant. PR doesn't come into it. Just for the record, I never said content is irrelevant for ranking. In fact, I never mentioned ranking. PR != ranking. If PR was very highly correlated to ranking then all the PR10 sites would appear in every results set...

Don't want to start a flame, apologies for the rubbish comment, so let's just agree to disagree