When there is a toolbar PR update lots of things change. The Search Engine forums discuss these changes and post their findings and theories and the SEO community lookings over all the changes and theorize why the different things have happened. I keep a list of all the PR 10 Pages and Page Rank 10 Sites on the internet. This Oct 6th PR update saw 37 out of 152 PR10 pages drop to PR9's. This post takes a look at one of the theories why this has happened. The following are the PR10s that moved to PR9s for each company. Adobe 4/51 pages, Apple 7/27 pages, Google 7/35 pages, MicroSoft 5/6 pages, w3.org 2/4 and nsf.org 1/2 pages. Beside these pages there were 11/28 sites that had their only PR10 page drop to a PR9. One theory why this has happened is that real PageRank has a maximum value of the number of pages in Google's index. As the index gets bigger the real PageRank number increases. Markus Sobek in his article A Survey of Google’s PageRank theorizes that the real PageRank has a maximum value of dN+(1-d) where N is the total number of web pages in the index (d is usually set to 0.85), and that a real PageRank is scaled to be displayed on the Google toolbar. It is generally accepted that this scalation is logarithmically. The main reason it is assumed that the toolbar scale is logarithmic is as you go up the scale it takes many more links to get a PR3 then it takes to get a PR4 or PR5. Also the small number of pages that reach PR10 shows this also. When the real PageRank numbers increase, the range of each of the toolbar scale units moves up. When this happens the lower range of real PageRank in each toolbar unit (except the toolbar PR1 as it covers the very bottom of the real PageRank numbers) is then covered by the toolbar PR value below. Some hold that this is why 37 PR10's slipped to PR9's in this toolbar update. (The below graphic is not to scale but gives you a visual of the theory of what has happened.) Research is still being done to find all the new PR10 pages and new sites that have picked up PR10 pages. I will be doing a post my findings some time next week.
i agree it will be due to the increase of googles index - i think it also applies to amount of links each site has aswell - as in if every single page on the web had a 100 links that would become the new "0" if you see what i mean - (forgive me if u said something along those lines) - i'm a bit ill and can't think of a better way to put it. i am kind of thinking this is possibly part of the reason my site is still PR4 when i really thought a solid 3 months of agressive linking would knock it up to 5.
with the PR pie ever increasing, google has to make it harder to acheive each level, or every site will be pr 6 pretty easily.
I started a blog in mid-September this year... made only 3 posts and have only 10-12 baclinks (IMO) from some directories and forums. This PR update gave me a PR of 3 from 0. The blog is on a new domain I registered for it (in Sept). Although 3 is not a great value but still... its a new blog with no great backlinks.
TOPS30: my.statcounter.com and "www.statcounter.com" are the same page. "www.statcounter.com" was #139 in my PR 10 Pages June 2004 list.
I have heard a lot of site loosing PR, some get a PR0 and some just get downgraded a notch. They must have increased what each PR is worth.
Not necessarily... PR is relative to everyone else, so basically for every site that goes up, there is one going down.
Is it? I thought PR was an ever expanding pie just the amount of pie that it took to reach a higher PR was altered.
No... PageRank is a scale relative to all other pages that Google knows about. I don't know what the actual percentages are, but for ease of math, let's just say 1 out of 1,000,000 pages are PR10. If you have 1,000,000 pages in the index, 1 will be PR10. If you have 50,000,000, then 50 would be. With those 50 being the highest total "real" PageRank number (the "real" PageRank is internal to Google and is a unique number for every page... probably a number between 1 and how ever many pages are in the index). The toolbar PageRank (0-10) is just a dumbed down summary version of what Google uses internally.
well - that would explain what some were saying a few weeks ago about pages disappearing from the index. Maybe the index was 'cleaned up' and reduced, thus PR10 positions have been reduced.
The toolbar now shows our busiest site as PR4 down from PR5 yet backlinks have increased, pages indexed, visitors, and even ranking of keywords have improved. So it seems odd that one would go down to pr4 and other sites have remained at PR5 ?!? Oh well, get more links, keep improving, get more sales...
As Shawn correctly pointed out, PR is all relative and in the big picture, it's a zero-sum game ... so (to simplify), it would be nice if some PR7 site dropped to PR6 to www.komar.org could move up! ;-)
everyone: I am getting my list together for new PR10 sites and pages. Google Picked up 12 PR10 pages, NFS 2 PR10 pages and W3C.org 1 PR10 page. So 37 PR10 pages dropped down to PR9's and there are 15 new PR10 pages. I expecting to find a few more but this is all that my first scan came up with. Sites: Google Store Worldwide Pages: Google Search Application - Contact Google Search Application Google Search Application - CustomersGoogle Job Opportunties - Balance Google Job Opportunties - Benefits Google Job Opportunties - Culture Google Job Opportunties - Inside Google Job Opportunties - Positions Google Job Opportunties - Reasons Google Wireless Service Google Store Worldwide Privacy Policy Google Store Privacy Policy NFS - News NFS - Search W3C Software License
"it takes many more links to get a PR3 then it takes to get a PR4 or PR5" Look at medhahari.com 1 (backlinks) PR5 2 (number of pages) ?
medhahrl: Yes that statement is incorrect. It should read as follows. After I saw the error time had run out on editing it and I figured everyone would know I just mixed the numbers up.
Bob, I don't know how up to date you're keeping this list, but here's a few more PR10s I've found: http://www.statcounter.com/ http://web.mit.edu/ http://www.webstandards.org/ http://www.webstandards.org/about/
onlinedude: I will start tracking it again after I get the page mySQL'ed. I just got my SEO Tools page mySQL'ed and I am just working out a few of the bugs in that. All the categories are not seperate pages and it is so so easy to add up new tools now. The page is 102KB now after I added another 10 tools so some of the search engines may not get all the content. http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html With the new pages it makes it attractive for winning the tools of the month as you now get a pick in the body of the page for all 20 pages. Thanks for letting me know about the new PR10 pages. I am very happy for webstandards.org to see they picked up 2 PR10 pages. Keep in touch!