Do You Know the Real PR story
Google Ranks all Pages
PR - Page Rank. Google’s method of ranking all the web pages on the internet. Notice I said pages, not sites. Google actually rates each page. For bloggers, sometimes you will see that your home page has a PR of 3 but one of your pages has a 4. You quickly flip back to home page. Have I had an increase in my PR - no - it goes back to 3. Google does rank each page.
No Such Thing As An Update
I read a lot of articles on Page Rank and how they are updated every three months; and that the last one was late; and the next one is due any day now. Sorry to disappoint you folks. When your PR appears in your tool bar (if you have in enabled), it is already probably 4 to 6 weeks out of date. In fact, there is no such thing as a PR update. Google refer to it as Page Rank Export. As for every three months. The longest gap between ‘exports’ was 246 days - that is 8 months.
What is Page Rank Export?
Google is constantly updating your Page Rank. Every now and then, supposedly every three months, Google ‘export’ the rank that is in their database to the toolbars . The PR you see in your toolbar is the PR that was stored into the database on a given day in the past. Which day/date - who knows. One thing is known, it is not the Page Rank of your pages on the day it is exported.
Is your PR fixed for that three months?
The real story is that your PR is not a fixed value. You do not get a score say a PR of 3 that then stays with you until the next ‘export’. Your Page Rank is constantly in flux. It may be a 3 today and 4 tomorrow and back to a 3 the following day. You would never know - and never will. Google spiders pages all day everyday. It uses that information to calculate your pages worth as compared to other pages. If a page improves itself then it will increase, at the expense of someone else’s. If yours then improves, your value will increase, at the expense of someone else’s. You will never know. You only get to see what Google exports to the toolbar, and that is on an irregular basis.
What about the PR score
Your PR score is what is released to the toolbar - basically a score between zero and nine. Your true rank is not a whole number - it could 3.293848589 as an example and that number is constantly fluctuating. Don’t look at your PR and say, wow, I have a three, or two, or whatever. To really understand where you are in the big scheme of things, make sure you use long keywords. Do a Google search on those long keywords. You may be surprised at the the results.
Links
Page Rank Update/Export List History - this link has information on past dates of PR exports
What is an update? - Matt Cutts from Google explains a little
More info on pagerank - More from Matt Cutts
Explaining algorithm updates and data refreshes - and you guessed it - Matt Cutts again
The bottom line, don’t hang out for your “page rank update”. Your page rank is already there - it is in the system - it is constantly changing. Worry more about what you are doing with your blog or web page each day.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:11 am
Thanks for sharing the information, Les.
Abhinav Sood | Inspirit Blog
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:56 am
Appreciate the clarification of the page ranking. Always wondered how it works…
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:33 am
Good info! Gave you a stumble.
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Great job. You clarified lot of myths about Google PR. Thanks for other informative links.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Good article. In my opinion Google should do away with the toolbar as PR has no value what so ever unless you intend on using it to sell links on your website.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Thanks for the info. I didn’t know that it wasn’t updated regularly
January 6th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Hello! Thank you for interesting info.
January 25th, 2008 at 7:02 am
Very good information and a much needed clarification of the Google PR. For those who blog as part of their online marketing strategy it is important to understand how PR is calculated.