I’ve been looking at Google PR for various sites since Elliot wrote about Google updating their Page Ranks.
It looks like Google made their latest update on June 27th.
Honestly I was not happy that TheDomains.com which had a Page rank of 6 for well over 1 1/2 years, dropped to a 5.
Then I started looking around various sites and saw that Google now only has a PR of 9 while Facebook has a PR of 10.
Actually according to SearchEngineGenie.com there are only 10 sites in the world with a PR of 10.
So if there are only 10 sites in the world with a PR of 10 then 10 is really not an attainable goal.
I mean if Google.com and CNN.com can only achieve a Page Rank of 9 what hope does a popular site have to reach a 10?
Godaddy.com is only a 7, techCrunch.com is an 8, Bing.com is an 8, Yahoo.com, Youtube.com and Twitter.com have a PR of 9.
So lets pretty much call the top achievable number a 9 not a 10, for 99.9999999999999% of all sites in the world.
Certainly its important to have a Page Rank but how accurate are Page Ranks?
I looked at some sites I own or are involved in and I have to admit it doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Thedomains.com which now has a PR of 5, has 12,600 pages indexed in Google and has 378 back links in Google.
MostWantedDomains.com also has a PR of 5, but only has 10,300 index pages and only 31 back links.
LuxuryBedding.com only has a PR of 3 but has been in the number one position under the search results for term “Luxury Bedding” for over 2 years so what’s more important to be number 1 or have a higher Page Rank?
Finally Rightofthedot.com which was just launched in January has a Google PR of 4 although it only has 21 pages index by Google and 16 back links.
So I guess I’m saying I don’t get it.
How can one site with 10x more back links and more index pages have the same PR like MostWantedDomains.com and TheDomains.com?
How can a site with less than 1% of the indexed pages and back links compared to another in the same industry only have a 1PR difference?
I’m sure there are some SEO guys out there that can shed some light on Google PR and its importance and how the number is formulated.
But I guess if there was a true answer Google would still be a 10 rather than a 9.
I registered a .NL 4 months ago. Zero everything, domain was never used for anything. But it was a first name and that’s why i regged it.
The domain was dumped/parked at whypark and it has now a pagerank of 3…… Infact 17 more of my parked domains gained pagerank… makes sense ? no.
Hey Michael PR is just a marketing tool for link sellers these days, the most important thing is value and user experience. So TheDomains will be fine! I have ranked PR3 sites over PR6’s and done some studies on PR impact on indexing, there is no impact. I think Google uses it to play games with SEO’s lol
I can surely say two things regarding PR, first is that PR for a a new website is adjusted in 2-3 PR updates so you can your website rightodthedot drop in the next PR update(hopefully not).
Second thing I noticed was that Google Adsense paid better when a domain of mine had a higher PR, even parked. This applies to websites as well, in fact on of my websites have more clicks with adsense but far less revenue than before. Even though that website gained backlinks and got more revelant content PR dropped so I can relate drop of revenue with it.
No one knows anything for certain (and we probably won’t until the civil discovery process in their anti trust case), but in my opinion and observation, there are a lot of things pertaining to search relevance that are yesterdays news, as far as the degree of their magnitude and relevance.
I doubt the broader concept of pagerank will ever go anywhere since it acts as a pretty reliable relevancy mechanism in terms of how it flows, but IMO, I don’t think it’s quite the beast that it once was.
Links mean a lot (damn near everything if you don’t have enough of them), but the complexion of the internet isn’t as it was in 2001 and the braintrust at G is smart enough to recognize this. Social Media chatter is rapidly becoming (or, has already become) a far more meaningful arbiter of real-time relevance than, for example, links on blogs or forums.
My hunch is that PR might be a contingent metric on the backside of the algo formula, but the ‘goodness’ of the frontside relevancy signals is really what G wants to refine and if you have enough of such signals, your PR simply resolves them into an answer, that is in turn resolved into serp placement.
Could be wrong, but I would definitely bet hard earned money on this being the case.
Mike,
The “quality” of the links is much more important to search rank than the “number of links”.
The same is true for the effect on PR. As an example, 1 link from a PR8 site will give you a PR4 or 5 whereas 100 links from PR2 sites will not give you a PR4 or 5. Note that a PR8 site is normally a “quality” site, hence its influence is higher than PR2 sites.
– Richard
^ absolutely correct ^
What’s interesting to see is how PR flowage relates interrelates with the real time signals that they seem to be emphasizing so heavily.
Understood but still doesn’t explain how a site with 30 back links can have the same PR as one with 380
Most likely the reason why is due to the quality of the 30 links or how high of a PR those thirty sites have. It’s easy to boost your PR by getting a link from a high PR site. Also the 30 link site could have a 310 going into it.
strange, but, it seems that Google hides us “something”… 😐
Yep.
One PR8 link is going to be better than 1000 BL’s from a penaized PR0 farm.
@ Berkens:
Imagine if Google was your house, any given website was a ‘visitor’ knocking on your front door and PR was how much ‘trust’ you give them.
SERP is whether you decide to let them in or not.
You hear a knock on the door, look out the window and see it’s your best friend Joe. You know you can trust him and pretty much anyone he brings with him, so you holler out “Come on in… beer’s in the fridge” That’s high pagerank.
You hear a knock on the door and it’s your neighbor Dave. Nice enough guy, Dave, so you answer the door and see what he needs. That’s intermediate pagerank.
Knock on the door, 19 year old kid with a backwards hat and sagging pants, carrying a clipboard, selling magazine subscriptions. Low pagerank.
Someone with a skimask climbing through your bedroom window at 3:30 am- that’s no, or penalized, pagerank.
Now, imagine you’re in search of a good plumber. You start asking around…
Best friend Joe *is* a plumber. You’re going to totally trust his opinion. (high PR)
Neighbor Dave knows a really good plumber. You’re going to value his opinion somewhat. (intermediate PR)
The kid selling magazines says he has an uncle who is a plumber and works cheap… You’re not going to value his opinion that much. (low PR)
The burglar crawling through your window stole a pipe wrench last week (no/penalty PR)
This same intellectual process we humans do as a function of instinct is basically what G is trying to duplicate algorithmically, attempting to quantify ‘credibility’ of information into a math problem. They understand that it doesn’t really matter what 100 magazine salesmen think about plumbing, compared to what 5 bona-fide plumbers think about plumbing, so that’s what they’re trying to resolve.
Oh yeah. Add to to the above…
Now, imagine that everywhere you go, you start to hear talk of this *GREAT* plumber who works cheap. Your grocery bagger says this guy is the best. Your butcher says the same thing… A couple guys at work both used him and man, the guy is just tits. You head to the deli for lunch and believe it or not, overhead the waitresses talking about this same, great plumber.
That is ‘chatter’ or ‘buzz’ and it’s what G seems to be emphasizing pretty heavily these days. While the origins of the chatter (it’s PR) is factored in to serp, it seems that now, so is the volume. Chatter probably relates to their real-time serp dynamics, up and down, depending on volume, PR and all the other ingredients in their algorithmic soup.
“BullS” websites has a PR of 10+ or whatever because I know how to do it.
PR=pee rank
Hi,
Maybe this will shed some light on this subject…or not: 😉
June 29th…
” The company’s officials announced that Google Panda is here to replace the old Page Rank method that had a lot of complaints. It will matter less the way other sites are sending traffic than the way one user uses the site.
It will matter most the time that one user is spending on the site, the pages that he uses and the way he navigates through it.”
http://newsinabox.net/1540/google-s-panda-update-changed-the-old-seo-method.html
___
‘D’
http://www.ji.gs/pr.png is roughly how it works.
Manual tweaks or punishments aside, pr is just a formula that assesses the number and quality (based on the pr of the link origin) of links to a page. I once tried to read the papers on it, all patent owned still by Stanford and licensed to Google through the founders I think. The maths is quite hairy but the end results are qualitatively straightforward.
Google changes the value of the constants in the formula that represent things like the value of a single link and the base value of an unlinked page, and a dampening factor across the whole lot. By allowing these constants to be linked to the whole keyword scoring system it allows a hybrid pagerank algorithm to actually assign a pretty good ranking based on popularity and keyword relevence. Good, even beautiful, idea imo, nice one Larry 🙂
Unless there is a manual intervention (unlikely imo) then this just says that more websites of on average higher quality are linking to facebook than to google, no surprise at all really.
Here’s some more about Pagerank from the horse’s mouth:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/beyond-pagerank-graduating-to.html
Notice the part that reads:
“So the PR you see publicly is different from the number our algorithm actually uses for ranking. Why bother with a number that’s at best three steps removed from your actual goal, when you could instead directly measure what you want to achieve? Finding metrics that are directly related to your business goals allows you to spend your time furthering those goals.”
So it isn’t really very useful of a metric imo… I wouldn’t sweat the drop you just experienced at all.
Pagerank is easy to game…
Interesting article – search presence http://GenericDirectories.com
Pagerank is logarithmic. This is why there are not many page rank 10’s, it’s also a closed system, so it scales as sites are added into the ‘web’ and page rank is recalculated.
All links are not equal. One site with 10 links could all come from pr7/8/9 home pages, the other site with 100 could come from pages what are barely indexed and that have no pr. Pr flows from page to page and is scaled, so it’s not fixed and it’s a closed system, if more sites are calculated (during updates) then everyone’s pr goes down. You could be 6.00001 then 5.999999 in theory.
What you link to and how many pages you have also dilutes your pagerank. It’s not a simple system but the original white papers that search engineers wrote on the topic are the best place to learn how it works.
Hope that makes more sense MHB.
I don’t understand this update of PR by google. Many website’s PR drop. But to my surprise, my website jumped from PR0 to PR3. Very amazing.
Google does not show all the backlinks to your site. There are many more than what google shows and they all count. Google has stated that they only display a partial list of your backlinks. TheDomains.com has 32,000+ backlinks. Most of which are from blogs and most from the same group of sites. Blogs are the lowest value as far as in links are concerned.
The number of pages indexed is irrelevant as far as pagerank is concerned. The more you link out, the more you bleed your PR. Including linking within your own site.
PR4 is fairly easy to get, 5 and 6 are harder but not uncommon, the big jump is at 7. That’s why PR7 domains fetch a huge price. I would guess that you would be back at 6 on the next update. I have had several domains fluctuate between 5 and 6. But never got to a 7. Rightofthedot has 131 inlinks with several being from Afilias which is probably where you got the quick bump. Afilias is a PR8 at the top, so it carries a big stick. Again a 4 is not that big of a deal. It will be considerably harder to get to a 5. The difference between a 2 and 3 is minimal, but the difference between a 4 and 5 is pretty big. The jump from 6 to 7 is a chasm.
Maybe Googles PR9 isn’t as good as Facebook PR10 because the majority of time spent online is on Facebook more so than Google/Twitter etc. The amount of people linking within Facebook and back to facebook for personal/business pages and the sheer site of the content.
Google should also be penalised because of duplicate content lol!
2 of my .co domains – SDCC.co and zoop.co both now have a pagerank of 3. I dont think anyone really cares about pagerank anymore. I feel its just a marketing edge so one can charge more for links and advertising.
doesn’t matter how accurate PR is. or if PR even matters. the quote from google’s blog is great.
what matters is how accurate customer _think_ it is.
plenty of customers are happy to accept a metric on rumour that it’s related to their business goals, and to accept it without every enquiring as to how it works.
instead they might ask “is it accurate?”
one could tell them “yes” and claim to be an “expert”. hello seo.
guess how many customers will be satisfied with that? almost all of them.
this is human nature.
the internet is an experiment in mass ignorance.
it’s frightening.
one of my favs is people who routinely sell freely available information.
who would buy free information?
customers who can’t be bothered to retrieve the info themselves?
or customers who don’t know how to retrieve the info themselves?
both?
if you want to understand PR read the patent. i think it may now be expired- how much effect does that have on google? this should tell you something.
computers make us lazy. but in terms of learning, they make accessing the needed information easy.
IMO, the only value Page Rank had is when Stanford exercise their Google stock option for hundreds of million based on owning the patent. Page Rank 10 is impossible unless you own an online empire.
IMO, Google Panda devoured my top traffic sites with a flick of a switch. 5 sites with 30,000 unique per month are eliminated. Same site don’t generic more than 500 monthly unique combined.
Imagine another site that copy and pastes your article on their platform receive the number #1 spot. They get ranked for the term you created while you get de ranked and your original article is pushed to page 20.
I don’t believe in the accuracy of anything named GPR and Google. They take take away traffic in an instant. I have data to prove it.
IMO, the only value Page Rank had is when Stanford exercised their Google stock option for hundreds of million based on owning the patent. Page Rank 10 is impossible to reach unless you own an online empire.
IMO, Google Panda devoured my top traffic sites with a flick of a switch. 5 sites with 30,000 unique per month are eliminated. Same sites don’t generate more than 500 monthly uniques combined.
Imagine another site that copied and pastes your article on their platform to showcase your article. They receive the number #1 spot for your content. The site gets ranked high for the term you created, while your site gets de ranked and your original article is pushed to page 20. I suppose the site is treated better because they are a leader in their niche.
I don’t believe in the accuracy of anything named GPR and Google. They can take take away traffic in an instant. I have data to prove it.