Hi all,

Ok so today I woke up, put on some coffee and fired up the comp. Much to my surprise an update had taken place so I was eager to find out about what changes took place that would affect me.

First of all, several months ago (January) I gave up chasing PR, in fact I scrapped the toolbar as suggested by many SEO's. Once I got rid of the PR bar I really started noticing the changes in my rank. Since I gave up on the PR bar I have watched traffic soar on certain keywords as page optimization has become the focus.

This morning I go and look at PR on my sites. It is nice to know what the PR is because that helps when aquiring link exchanges. On the sites that I have spent many hours getting link exchanges for the PR stayed the same. In fact one of my sites went from 80 backlinks showing in Google to 304, yet no change took place, the PR is still 4. Im not concerned about this because I am focusing on optimization for the most part. What I am curious about however is a site with only 7 backlinks, some being from my own sites, went from 0/10 to 5/10. The new website only has maybe 10 pages indexed and very little content as it is new and I havent spent any time on it.

How can this be? A site that was 4/10 with 80 backlinks moves up to 304 backlinks and PR stays the same. A site with few pages and a couple of backlinks jumps from 0/10 to 5/10.

I guess I am just curious as to whether this is common or not.

Thoughts?

Yup toolbar PR just updated.

I am aware of that, but that still doesnt help much as far as my curiousity.

I think that PR as seen by the toolbar is not all it's made out to be. My portal site Startpage Ireland has only outgoing links, no content at all, but it still jumped from PR 0 to PR 4 yesterday.

It's nice to have it showing higher than 0, but as far as I can tell, it means nothing at all...

actually it does have inbound links +domain

But you are right about toolbar PR.

I guess I wasnt clear, I have a site that is 4/10 and as of today is showing 385 backlinks in Google. That site has been 4/10 since Jan but no change this time. In January I only had 80 or so backlinks in Google.

A brand spanking new site with only a couple of backlinks and no really good solid ones went straight from 0/10 to 5/10.

WTF?

just goes to show how meaningless TPR really is!


threadwatch


<edited grammar>

similar strange behavior on one of my sites. The home page which has incoming links from PR8 and 7 sites went down from a 6 to a 5. A glossary page that has no incoming links and is only crossed linked internally jumped from a 2 to a 6.
Recap -
Page with lots of high PR links drops from 6 to 5
Page with no incoming links moves from 2 to 6 ---

Google is messing with our heads.

Originally Posted by AnthemIT

Google is messing with our heads.

Well, No not really, It's simply that you're letting them.

All we have to do is focus on promotion and optimization, not the valueless toolbar

Thanks guys, I can tell by looking at the sites in your signatures that I need to respect your sage advice.