Alot of webmasters and 'SEOs' alike ask tons of questions about why their PR has dropped, how they can increase it, etc., etc. I'm here to set the record straight. Google PR IS a major part of your rankings. HOWEVER, the way everyone here uses the term (99% of the time) is in reference to the VISIBLE Google PR value found in their toolbar. This is a POOR measure of PR folks and should not be used in ANY discussion about rankings or loss. What we know: Google Visible Green Toolbar is updated quarterly. The information in the toolbar is not only old, but it's only snapshot of the overall health of a web site. Basically it's a loose indicator of the value of the incoming links to that particular web site. But even then it's inaccurate. You do'nt want to even base links (those you acquire) solely on this value. Case in point. I have a web site, back links recorded, more in Webmasters. There are nothing but junky (but related) links. The links are PR3 or less (ALL OF THEM), HOWEVER, what we see is a PR 5 for the web site that is slightly more than a year. WHY?
and you are? if your not matt cutts then your gonna have a little trouble convincing us in what way does it affect them? i would like to see some proof behind what your saying here you will excuse me if i dont just trust everything you say off the block ah so you must be referring to the invisible non toolbar related PR that we talk about 1% of the time? damn green bar yeah we knew that its based on info within the last three months i would not really call that old. its not a snapshot of the health of the website its is a measure of the PR passed on by inbound links from other sites yeah now you got it no one does that they just use the link:www.mysite.com in yahoo and that gives a pretty accurate number. i dont even know how you would work out how many inbound links you have based just on PR. is this possible? because you can get a pr10 with enough pr3 backlinks http://www.websitegoodies.com/prchart.htm but you wtill havtn justified your original point that pr has anything to do with your search engine ranking. you have just stated a few facts and asked a basic question
Yes,I was beginning to say the same thing: with a million of PR3 (aleatory,just for example) you can have a PR10 and there is nothing strange. There is an existing scheme with all the number of links PR2,PR3,PR4,PR5,and so on that you need to have to get a higher page rank, don't remember where it is (URL).
The total amount of PR pushed to a page is the pages PR times a dampening factor (.85) divided by the number of links the page has. So .... A PR5 page that has 10 links on it gives each link PR0.425 This is further complicated by the fact that the pages PR might actually be 5.43, but google will never give us that much information. The green PR bar is accurate for the 3 months before the last toolbar PR update. As it stands now that is from the months of Jan-Mar 2007. It's inaccurate to say the least.
The toolbar PR is not necessarily inaccurate. It may be, it may not be. If you have done some aggressive link-building since the last toolbar PR export, then the toolbar is probably lower than your up-to-date "real" PR at Google. But if you haven't been adding good-quality links, then the toolbar PR is probably pretty close to your "real" PR, even a month or two or three after the last PR export.
Wow, some damm good info for me here, since I just hit pr5 last update prior the the one in August where I dropped my homepage to a pr2 and all other pages are still pr4 . I guess I just sold too many links on my homepage and passed too much power down eh? I got more pr5 and 4 links to my page then I sold to pr1 and 0's though, so I thought I would have gained more than I lost/passed down, but I guess not. Really though, screw trying to figure out the complete algorithm cause it always changes anyway. Bottom line is high pr links that are relevant and you will rank if you have GOOD content since content is king.