PR Update

**Alpharetta** · 04-28-2007, 07:50 PM

How is everyone doing with the latest PR update underway from Google. Good, bad or the same.

O.K. I can't stand it. I have been focusing on adding deeper links to my website for a few months and my internal PR is showing up as the same as my homepage.

Anyone else want to share???

**Codythebest** · 04-28-2007, 07:55 PM

The only thing I can share is this: PR is meaningless...
What matter is SERP.

**Alpharetta** · 04-28-2007, 08:07 PM

Cody,

I sort of agree and disagree with you.

PR is a component of how and why you are in the postion you are in the SERPS. I think it is an oversimplification to say that PR is meaningless. If what you mean to say is that the toolbar PR that many people frequently utilize to determine something about a website, then yes it is meaningless. If you follow the updates and you know what you are doing to increase the PR of your website, when the new update comes out, you can use it to help determine if your SEO practices are succesful.

**Codythebest** · 04-29-2007, 04:42 AM

How do you follow the updates?

**HHI Golf Guy** · 04-29-2007, 08:48 PM

Originally Posted by Alpharetta

If you follow the updates and you know what you are doing to increase the PR of your website, when the new update comes out, you can use it to help determine if your SEO practices are succesful.

I always judge my success on how my sites rank for my keywords. After that, I study conversions. Nothing else matters.

Google's algorithm uses what they call Page Rank to determine where to rank sites for a given query. However, there is no correlation between that PR and the Google toolbar PR. Originally, when toolbar PR first came out there was some level of correlation between site strength and toolbar PR. As Google's algorithm evolved, even that small correlation diminished.

Trust Rank is the new mantra today. And even that will change as personalized search and local search become more mainstream, and algorithms become better at KW stemming.

**Alpharetta** · 05-03-2007, 12:18 PM

Well, PR is part of the algorithm and let's you know a bit about what Google thinks of your website. It is partially responsible with where you rank in the SERPS. If you think this is no big deal then so be it. The toolbar is not up to date - that is for sure. However when they update the PR toolbar, you can look back and see where you were and where you are. This is a barometer that I don't think should be ignored. Just understand that what you see is not what your PR is. True PR is updated very often and the tool bar is not.

You can check your PR from multiple datacenters here:

http://livepr.raketforskning.com/

**HHI Golf Guy** · 05-03-2007, 12:23 PM

Toolbar PR has zero correlation to algorithmic Page Rank. They are two different entities.

**Alpharetta** · 05-03-2007, 12:30 PM

That's not my understanding from what I have read. Can you provide a source for that. My understanding is that what you see in your toolbar is in fact the actual pagerank of your website from an earlier date. I believe that was from Matt Cutts. I will see if I can find it. I would like to see where your info is from as well.

**HHI Golf Guy** · 05-03-2007, 12:44 PM

This has been discussed to death on a number of forums and at SES and PubCon over the past few years. I don't have time to track down URL's for you.

If SERP's and Toolbar PR had any correlation (even on a delayed basis) most of the top 10-20 rankings for competitive KW's would have high PR. That's just not the case.

Take your favorite competitive KW and write down the PR for all of the sites in the top 30. Next time there is a PR update look at the PR of the top 30 sites at that time. Did all sites that gained PR gain in SERP's? Did all sites that lost PR drop in SERP's?

Granted, there other many other factors that can impact rankings as well. You also need to study hundreds of other data sets in different sectors to begin to draw any real conclusions. But even looking at one data set over a long period of time will help you draw conclusions.

Toolbar PR is a function of link popularity and not a function of how a site ranks for any particular KW. If it was, then it would need to display different PR for each KW search.

Toolbar PR is also not a good gauge on overall credibility or strength of a web site. For that, you need to look in to Trust Rank.

**Alpharetta** · 05-03-2007, 12:54 PM

Here are some very good answers from Matt himself. It is the actual pagerank that Google uses that shows in the toolbar.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-info-on-pagerank/

Here is an excerpt:

New Jersey SEO asked: “Will this PR update affect SERPs? Are we going to have also a SERP data refresh / update?”
Great question. By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.

So your pagerank that you see in your toolbar is part of what is used to calculate your SERPS....

Think of it as just part of a big net that contains lots of things that affect your rankings.