This is NOT a PR Update

If they have identical backlinks, and all of these links pages have been indexed by Google then yes, yes they will.

Content, relevancy, age following Google's guidelines and period of linkbuilding don't have an affect on PR.

People seem to be confusing rankings and Pagerank - the two are different - very different.

 

Perhaps you should read the links that you kindly provided earlier!

 

What are you referring to?

 

Your statement that linkbuilding does not affect PR.......

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

Source: http://www.google.com/technology/

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important". ”
In other words, a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

Numerous academic papers concerning PageRank have been published since Page and Brin's original paper[3]. In practice, the PageRank concept has proven to be vulnerable to manipulation, and extensive research has been devoted to identifying falsely inflated PageRank and ways to ignore links from documents with falsely inflated PageRank.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

So what is PageRank?
In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page).

Source: http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

2.2 Anchor Text
The text of links is treated in a special way in our search engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points to. This has several advantages. First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves. Second, anchors may exist for documents which cannot be indexed by a text-based search engine, such as images, programs, and databases. This makes it possible to return web pages which have not actually been crawled. Note that pages that have not been crawled can cause problems, since they are never checked for validity before being returned to the user. In this case, the search engine can even return a page that never actually existed, but had hyperlinks pointing to it. However, it is possible to sort the results, so that this particular problem rarely happens.
This idea of propagating anchor text to the page it refers to was implemented in the World Wide Web Worm [McBryan 94] especially because it helps search non-text information, and expands the search coverage with fewer downloaded documents. We use anchor propagation mostly because anchor text can help provide better quality results. Using anchor text efficiently is technically difficult because of the large amounts of data which must be processed. In our current crawl of 24 million pages, we had over 259 million anchors which we indexed.

Source: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

 

yes... google is updating it's databases from all different datacenters everyday .... what we can see very 3 months, are just some exports ...(I think some very old exports)

 

Arcos, Page Rank is relative to the number of pages in the google index. So it is quite possible that a site with the same amount of backlinks can lose PR if the index gets bigger. But then again, there is no point in my posting as no one knows how Google Pr works right? I mean to say that their patents don't count for squat right?

Seriously though, saying 'no one knows but Google' is a statement that really is not worth saying isn't it. The FACT is that ONLY those involved with PR at Google know with 100% accuracy, but that does NOT mean you should discount the view of people who have a great understanding of it

You say

This strikes me as odd, because Google don't (to my knowledge) HAVE guidelines for improving PR. Google AFAIK, ONLY say the complete opposite, they tell you not to get involved with schemes designed to increase your Page Rank

Why have you mentioned content when discussing PR? Page rank has nothing to do with the content, PR is PURELY about link value. That said there is always topic sensitive PR, but I doubt you were referring to this were you?

So to conclude, of course no one knows with 100% accuracy how Pr is calculated, but there are many people who have a great understanding of it!

 

So I am right then!

 

No, not really. You were saying that statements of facts being made were just conjecture and guesses, which isn't true. We do understand how PageRank works. When you said:

the second 2 points were irrelevant to PR, and while the first might be true to a small degree, someone who knew what they were doing would be able to tell you why the PR was different on those two sites.

And just to clarify what MattUK said:

He wasn't saying link building didn't affect PageRank, he was saying speed of link building (not accounting for snapshot date, which is different) doesn't affect PR.

Now, is it possible that G might change their PR calculations in the future? Of course. But right now it's pretty cut and dried. How exactly they use PageRank in the ranking algo is of course an entirely different matter.

-Michael

 

Sorry Michael.......

Yes Really!

My comment was in response to the statement that "So to conclude, of course no one knows with 100% accuracy how Pr is calculated, but there are many people who have a great understanding of it!"

I do think the speed/period of linking is a bit of a red herring and was not mentioned in my original post.

 

Hi Matt.
You mention in your post that people are asking questions like "Why are the inner pages of my blog PR3 yet my main page is still PR0?" . Well that's exactly what has happened to two of my sites. Do you, or anyone, know why?
Thanks

 

I know it was, and what you are claiming to be "right" on is this statement:

Which is wrong. You were disagreeing with MattUK's post citing the authority sources on how PageRank is calculated. You couldn't get more wrong, I don't care how you back pedal it now.

-Michael

 

Arcos, There is a saying that says when in a hole stop digging.

You made a statement saying

Then when I explained a bit to you and pointed out the innacuracies in the post that contained it. You chose to TOTALLY ignore the rest of my post and take a line out of context.

sting 'so I am right then.

People know how it works but of course because they do not have access to the algorithm data they can not swear with 100% accuracy. What I am trying to say is that your attempt to put others down by saying 'nobody other than google knows' was wrong.

BUT the statement as a point of fact is right, OF COURSE no one other than Google know with 100% accuracy. But at what point will YOU accept that someone knows how it works? 10% 25% 50% 90% ? Do you see what I am saying to you know?

ALL you will achieve with smart arse snapbacks like 'so I am right then' is getting red repped and ignored. No one likes a smart arse. Some of the links that Matt posted were from Standford university and described EXACTLY how the page rank algorithm would work.

 

OWG/MVandermar, I understand (I think) all about how PR is calculated etc but the latest update isn't quite consistent with my understanding.

So I wonder, do you think it possible that they have amended the PR calculation to effectively exclude links less than a certain age (or in footers, or using some other criteria) from the PR calculation? This would the be first stage in re-aligning page rank with rankings perhaps?

I am thinking of a page for example that has a high PR link from Wikipedia but has only the same PR as the other pages in the rest of the section. It's possible the internal menu structure has redistributed the PR around the other pages, but that isn't how it looks from here.

There are many stories of sites that have not been worked on receiving increased PR while sites that have been actively worked on have not changed at all. I have the same situation. This might be explained by newer links being discounted or ignored.

I'm not sure what the explanation is yet, but I do suspect that something has changed about the PR calculation/attribution.

 

Without knowing what sites/links you are talking about, I can't know for sure... I do know that it depends on link age in the case of whether it was before/after the snapshot(s) used in the calculations. Do you know when the link was gained?

-Michael

 

That reallu is in the realms of guessing. BUT I am willing to guess with the worse of them I would guess that with the google algo being a sliding scale base 5 logarithmic algo, they could allow the Pr to count the same and lower the relevance of the anchor text. This would be a fart better way of combating bought links benefit, as bought links tend to go away after a period of time.

Just my thought and certainly the way I would take rather than faffing around with Pr as a combined value. Once it has been combined it can't be worked on.

 

It's possible, though I doubt it. I think Google are quite happy with webmasters running around chasing PR.

I'm guessing that links such as footer links, new links, etc are already devalued to some extent in the ranking algorithm, I don't see the logic in ammending the pagerank algorithm at the same time, especially when it doesn't even make up that large a part of the actual ranking algorithim.

As Michael said, it's difficul to know without looking at the sites concerned. There could be several reasons why a particulat page didn't get a good PR boost from a high PR page. Have a look to see how many outgoing links there are from the Wiki page - even a few can give the ability to pass PR a pretty big hit.

There are always stories like these floating around at update time - usually from disappointed people that believed a few PR4 links were going to bump them up to a PR5.

Remember that even sites that haven't had work done on them for ages can increase due to the PR of linking pages increasing.

Also, at the same time people could have been working hard on their sites for the past few months, but most of their hard work didn't get taken into account as it was after the snapshot date - it's just the way things go.

The only things that have seen that were strange around this update time was the 0ing of the PR of some peoples index pages - and that got fixed within a couple of days, and also some internal pages that look like thay got PR by mistake - and that sort of thing has happened before.