7 replies to this topic

[harrogate]

Not sure why but suddenly my PR fell from 3 to 2 in the last week. I haven't done anything SEO wise in the last month. Any ideas why ths would have happened and what the Google ranking impact will be? Thanks!

[torka]

Your toolbar PR may have dropped because Google pushed through one of their once-every-three-or-four-months updates, where they update the toolbar to display an approximation of what your "real" PR might have been at some indeterminate point in the past.

Or it may simply be a glitch in the toolbar, and all will be back to "normal" in a few days.

If it's because of an update, the drop would either mean that sometime over the last three or four months you lost some links that used to point to that page, or you reorganized your site's internal navigation so it doesn't send as much juice to that page, or some of the links that point to that page (whether internal to your site or external) lost value for some reason. Or maybe something else, but probably one of those three things. Assuming the change in the toolbar is a real change and not just a glitch.

Since the toolbar PR number is not used in any way in calculating your rankings, this change cannot possibly have any effect. On much of anything, really.

Any effect that might or might not have arisen from whatever it was that might or might not have caused your real PR to drop at some point over the past three or four months have already long since taken effect.

--Torka

[bwelford]

There was a Google Toolbar PageRank revision yesterday evening so many websites may have seen changes. I only saw upward movements on my online properties so I'm pretty happy.

Nevertheless it really does not signify anything important since what really counts is the Google internal PageRank measure which is continually updated. I have one blog that lost its PageRank for a time due to server problems. It moved to PR 0 in the previous TBPR upgrade and is still at PR 0 after this one. However I can see over the past two months significant increases in Google search traffic that confirms that things are going in the right direction.

Why Google does not forget about this indicator, I don't know. It causes needless anxiety and is of no practical use except to those who wish to sell links from higher PR pages.

[torka]

Why Google does not forget about this indicator, I don't know.

Because it's a nice, shiny thing to distract the unwary from paying attention to stuff that really matters...

--Torka

[Randy]

Can you imagine the uproar if they did away with it now? People would be screaming for the first born child of every single Google employee!

Just one of those really bad ideas that hung on far too long. Sort of like the concept bailing out companies because they're too big to fail.

[harrogate]

Thank you for the replies. I'm relieved to hear the toolbar PR doesn't affect the site's ranking. However, if I understand what you're saying the actual PR does affect it. So where/how do I get a reading of the actual PR?

[Randy]

So where/how do I get a reading of the actual PR?

You don't.

Google does not release the real PR info. It's far too sensitive to being reverse engineered.

[ScottSalwolke]

One thing that struck me as unusual about the PageRank update is that my home page went up, but the interior pages that had PR dropped completely.