Hey all, Is this true? The new PR we're seeing from this current update is based on data from last quarter? I saw a reference to that in another thread here, which would explain some of my concerns and expectations for new PRs. I also saw this on Matt Cutt's blog: ==== Supplemental Challenged said: “The fact that Google can only create a PR update that is a full quarter behind the times is awfully troubling.†Matt's answer: I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users (see the question below for more details on the timing). ==== Can someone confirm this? If so, why do that do that? Why don't they export the current PR values?
Based on both of those statements, I guess it would be safe to say that it is the 'toolbar' thats updated last and is what would be outdated, but the algo keeps current at all times. I am not saying I am right or wrong. Just basing it on what has been said.
Based on how old one of my new articles need to be to get a visible PR via the toolbar after an update, I'd say that the toolbar PR lags by about two months. Or to put it another way, for a new page to have a visible PR after a PR update it needs to have been published at least two months prior to an update taking place. As aoOn pointed out the PR we see in Google's toolbar in no way reflects the "real" PR used by Google's algos.
From what I have seen it is about July 20th give or take a few days for the cut off this time around. It is always behind, that way they never give away to much information to SEO's.
I don't think this is only a matter of keeping secrets from SEO's, I think there is also a technical aspect to this. The PR value we seen in the Google Toolbar seems to be a different dataset than the main search data. I suspect it takes a fair amount of work to process the data and complete a PR update. The two month lag may be simply a part of this lag.
I wish people would stop worrying so much about their pr and more about linking with quality sites to bring up their serps... pr has nothing to do with which page your key words bring up your site on any search engine in my opinion, as is often the case sites with lower pr out rank sites with higher pr. onpage optimizing, and relevant keyword rich anchor texts will eventually win you what you want which is serp right?
I tend to agree. One of my sites should have been PR5 six months ago based on the PRs and # of its IBLs. But it stayed PR2 all this time and finally caught up on the last update.
So do I. If you make your money from selling links and advertising on your site, however, you have no choice but to worry about PR. Good or bad, there is already a whole economy built around PR and some of us are forced to play along.
I think this is a very good point. We all know that the PR we see in the Google toolbar is nothing more than a relative figure and that it is not used in Google's algorithm. It is; however, a neutral third-party evaluation of the popularity of a site that advertisers like to use when evaluating how much they are willing to spend to advertise on a particular site (even if they aren't looking at a site for its back link value). We all know that an advertiser is going to be much more interested in a site that has some pages with a PR7 than a site that doesn't have any pages above a PR4. We don't have to like this little fact, but we do have to live with it if we are selling advertising space on our websites directly to advertisers.
Normal is about one month, and the most recent update seems unusual except when you take the strange August 24th update into account. The September 29th update seems to using the same data for it's snapshot period. However, that also gives us insight into the daily calculations for the period - believed to be about July 21-23rd - and/or how the snapshot works. I posted over at Matt Cutts blog about it, hoping for an answer as to what happened...
My PR went up on this last update (from PR0 to PR5) and my site has only been around since June 26th. If the PR data is from 3 months ago, that means that my site would have attained a PR5 in just 2 days. So this 3 months behind stuff is 100% not accurate.
Yes that's correct, I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say three months, my guesstimate is 6-8 weeks based on sites that I've seen get PR and those that haven't. I'm unsure of the exact reason behind the delayed export, it may be a technical reason, though current data is used in the SERPs pages, so Google have PR data 'available' to them at any point in time. Again, it *may* be that Google have a policy of releasing limited data to webmasters, which would also explain why the IBL numbers they release are far below what they are known to be.