Please forgive this absolute newbie question. I'm not a webmaster by trade, and I'm more at home with a pen than a keyboard, but... I've recently acquired a PR7 site and intend to generate a little income from it. However, on checking the Google datacenters over the past 24 hours I noticed that 6 of the 21 listed in the tool I used registered the site as a PR6. A couple of hours later that had increased to 9 datacenters, and now it's gone down to 8. Now, is this all simply the regular random bollocks that Google puts us through or is it an indication that my PR will stabilise at 6? Feel free to berate me for clogging up the boards with more of the amateurish questions you get every day, but I'm too curious not to ask and haven't been able to find anything through a search of the forums. Thanks p.s. Either way I'm winning - the site only cost me around $50
G fluctuations via our access ISP are similar to the results you received .............. dont know why ................and really dont care either ..............................the G PR tools appear to have daily variations ............so we only check and accept a PR after an official change by G. ...........thereafter we never check again until the next change from G. and yes either way at 50 Bucks you cannot lose
Google began to update PR on August 24th, and it froze. See this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=129939 Some older sites got updated, but all seemed to go down by 1. Backlinks updated that day as well, but they have all but reverted (one d/c showed those backlinks last night when I checked) to old values. Google may shift you off to another d/c even when you access it by IP sometimes. This is why you are seeing the fluctuatuation between 8 and 9 datacenters. This seems to be a bugged out update, many sites I have looked at should not have gone down. I would guess you will keep your 7. $50 is a good deal. And since you did not start another 'Google is updating PR' thread, we will not lynch you.
I don't want to give you any cognitive dissonance, but there's a chance that after you purchased the site, the seller pushed the links providing that PR elsewhere. If he removes them before any significant update, the PR6 is potentially what the PR will drop down to. Mind you, this depends on a large number of factors as well.
Thanks for your help, guys That seems unlikely. The site is a 7-year old highly respected blog that was abandoned for three years when it's owner went on to bigger and better things. All of the incoming links are organic and long term (obviously, the most recent incoming links are three years old), so I probably don't have to worry about an artificially inflated PR suddenly bursting on me.