What's up with Google's PR????

That's what they want people to think. In real life, I don't see any way they can hope to police this: what they are effectively suggesting is that if you sell links you should, for their benefit, alter them to nofollows or cgi-redirects that the search engines can't follow these links and assign PR. I can't imagine that catching on, or ever being remotely like something they can police, except in the case of large-scale link-selling operations.

This is a case of Matt Cutts announcing something in the hope of scaring a lot of webmasters into changing their websites, and putting them off buying links for PR. But nothing will change, until Google can see into the head of all the webmasters to discover whether a link was placed with the motive of profit, or from genuine altruism and a desire to show people useful resources.

Take sig links, for instance. How many of them are bought and sold, and how can you tell?

 

PR means little to nothing.

For instance I can have a site that has about 50 links into it for very well trusted sites. The site might have a PR4

I can buy a link or get a link from a PR 8 site and that can be my only link and I can get around a PR5 or 6.

Which gets more traffic (assuming both are exactly the same) OH yes the PR 4 will.


PR is so small not in the ALGo and is very misleading. The little Green bar means very little....

 

in that particular case/example you're correct, but overall PR does matter and does have an effect on your serps.

 

I didn't notice any decrease since the latest update. Mine went up.

 

Why would you assume that? It's a sum. You made the following statement:

That is just wrong. You could have a closed system of x number of interlinking domains which could only be reached by virtue of a single PR0 link pointing to a single one of those domains. If Google spiders and becomes aware of those domains, a default lower limit PageRank is assigned to each. if each of those domains in turn funnel links to a single domain, that domain will gain a cumulative PageRank, and it is not capped at what that resulting PageRank could in fact be.

-Michael

 

PR is about the combination of quality and quantity of links.

 

mine was PR5 but went down to PR4 after all the backlink efforts. sucks.

 

PR is like a carrot held in front of a donkey. It is not completely worthless (tastes good), but if that all you focus on, you may not end up where you want to be...

 

I guess its not always backlink that is responsible for PR. There are various other factors that affect it.

Well recently I went through Mr. Matt Cutts' blog and I would recomend all webmasters to read that regularly. This clearly explains why lots of sites loose PR.

 

Yes, it is ONLY backlinks. That is it, Nothing else. Period. End of story.

-Michael

 

From Last 2-Days my Site is Showing PR=3. Previously My site PR is 2.

 

I am expecting a minor update from google. Most of my sites' homepages have lower PR than their inner pages. I guess Google will pass once more over their data. I hope it wont be done too late.

 

Well, there might be a bit more to it than that implies. It's not just a number, divided by how many backlinks per page, multiplied by the PR of that page and then divided by a damping factor. There's the question of links which don't pass PR due to a manual or automatic penalty, and so on. There may well be different levels of PR dilution applied to different websites, according to Google's algorithms. We just don't know what's in the secret sauce.

 

Well, yes, theoretically there can be varying dampening factors to how PR is passed based on bannings, penalties due to being flagged as a link seller, etc... but even if they do exist, the dampeners are still applied to a number which is only calculated through links. Relevancy, valid HTML, keyword density, age of site, whether or not you cussed Matt Cutts out on his blog, hanging a horseshoe upside-down over your doorway, wearing garlic around your neck, and the myriad of other factors that people want to keep applying to PageRank have no direct bearing on it whatsoever.

I do agree that PageRank is only a portion of the overall ranking algo, but that portion is indeed based only on links.

-Michael

 

Well...wanna thank for all the opinions on a thread, which I was actually about to start/asking.
So here's and my one...
Generally on the theme - I have no explanation why PR decreases - it didn't on my own sites/actually a new <2 months site with just a few(not that good) links got PR3/, but I have observed it on plenty others.. However, i think it's all interconnected - although my homepage PR increased by 1/on the one year old sites/, some inner pages with PR of 2-3 are now with grey toolbar, which I definitely think is not a toolbar bug, but just the new way Google displays its supplemental results! Surely not all of these pages are in the supplemental index, but at least in my case - most of them...besides the unique content, tags...
A year ago, a SEO colleague of mine tried to convince me that future of good SER is only and only in the big sites with many pages, which I didn't believe and now its just proved - all pages of my smaller/page count/ sites still has their pr3-4 and no grey bars! So I agree with the one above who said that google is making place for new competition, but not sure if thats the right way. I have some pages with HUGE AMOUNT OF TOTALY UNIQUE content, which rank REALLY WORSE, compared to some with few sentences and a couple of pics, and I assure you that's not 'cos of the seo i did!
I doubt there will be another PR-update sooner than usual, but I have been observing some unusual changes in the supplemental index of google since March, which I think is all about.. as well as some general changes in their algo.
And again as someone said before that they try to police the paid links, not that im buying, but I'll at least for now shall be after the deep linking till its all a bit clearer...

Cheers & wish success to all of you!

ooo, yeah, and google really ruined the Internet with their webmaster-depressing behaviour, as well as with their not that good search results! Pity they are still the major SE, but as you know well this is decided by the users...

 

Yes, I set up a "crap" site just for tests that are able to answer questions like this. Gray bar from first to last page, no inbound link for one month,(recently I placed 1, ONE link in a directory) the site has 90 pages, actually 54 indexed and ranking, bad but ranking!

 

On my site the PR update had very strange effects. I have no PR for category, no PR for subcategory and PR2 for a product page, which is very very strange. I only had links to homepage which got PR3 and the links page got PR4 (crazy).

What should I think? Should I wait for another small patch? There is no logic in my situation. What do you think? Was PR update incomplete? Is this the first time ?