Google Toolbar PR Fluctuations

Posted by SEO Dave on April 4th, 2006 at 03:49pm

We had a toolbar PR update around Feb 18th and the next one is due around the end of May/beginning of June, so toolbar PR should be stable right now.

Some pages are showing pre toolbar update PR values (so what we saw prior to the Feb 18th update) and others are showing the new toolbar PR value (what we saw after Feb 18th). This is a first for me!

For example

http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/ updated to PR6 during the last PR toolbar update from a PR7. Yet sometimes it still shows a toolbar PR of 7, other times PR6.

right now the above is PR7 (old value).

http://www.jules-verne.co.uk/ updated to PR5 during the last PR toolbar update from a PR6. Yet sometimes it still shows a toolbar PR of 6, other times PR5.

right now the above is PR5 (new value).

Some could argue that PR is now updated constantly and we are seeing the values change because these pages are right between the two PR values. So when they loose a little PR they drop a point, when they gain a little PR they increase a point. I’d love that to be true (almost real time PR!), but other pages I’m tracking that are relatively new are flipping between PR0 and the new value (anywhere up to PR5) and you can’t have small fluctuations in linking structure/number of links etc… result in swings from PR0 to PR5 and back again! So we aren’t seeing real time PR :-( 

So this is weird, it’s appears the data is a mix of old and new PageRank values and is occasionally/randomly changing. I wonder what they are doing at Google?

Good news is this will have nothing to do with SERPs or updates (dances as some still call them) since all we are looking at is toolbar PR which isn’t the value used for the ranking algo (that will change more frequently), this toolbar PR data will be held on a separate set of servers so plebs like us get to see a PR value for our pages.

Your real PR value will be closer to the newer version than the old so take the new PR value as the one for estimates of link value etc…

For more information about PR see PageRank Explained.

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