Understanding PageRank
Many of you may hear a buzz this weekend about Google’s “PageRank update,” so I wanted to clear up some misconceptions so that you don’t lose focus on what’s important.
PageRank (or PR) is a measure of the link weight pointing to a page. The more links you get from pages that have more links to them, the higher your PageRank.
PageRank is just one of more than 100 variables that determine where Google ranks a page in the search results. Because of that, you’ll regularly see low PR pages outranking high PR pages for searches that you do.
What Google updated this weekend was not PageRank. PageRank updates (at least) daily. What they updated was the PageRank that appears in the Google Toolbar. Those are two very different things.
The Toolbar PR is just a snapshot of a page’s PR at some point in time. It’s not even the current PR. It’s what the PR was at some point in the past, but the actual PR could be much different already.
It’s really exciting to see the PR change because it’s a good measure of how important Google thinks your page is. Just don’t put too much weight on it. It’s fun, but it’s not the end-all be-all of anything.
gecko
April 30, 2007
at 4:37 pm
When a PR update happens, it doesn’t happen all at once – Google has many ‘datacenters’, and your new PR will ‘percolate’ between those datacentres over the next few days to a week.
Shane
April 30, 2007
at 4:44 pm
That’s a great point, gecko. If you’re sitting out there sad because yours didn’t change over the weekend, buck up. It looks like only within the last few hours has the update reached all datacenters, and the only one I’m not seeing it for now is toolbarqueries.google.com, which, I presume, is the main node. You should see your new value reflected in the toolbar soon.
Schools
June 13, 2007
at 8:31 am
I think page rank (at least the toolbar version) has to be on its way out. By revealing it, Google is enabling the link buying and trading that is undermining their algorythm. Why do they do it?
mlankton
October 4, 2007
at 12:36 pm
…and here we are in October with another late pagerank. Any ideas what the deal is?
Shane
October 4, 2007
at 12:40 pm
There’s been a lot of speculation about that. Some have even speculated that Google has stopped updating it altogether because of their crackdown (or at least purported crackdown) on link selling. Since links are priced largely based on PageRank, by not updating the Toolbar PR, they could be hoping to inflict even more damage on the process.