If you are a SEO man (or woman), interested in search engine technology and thus the mechanism behind Google’s pagerank, you should check out the blog of Matt Cutts on a regular basis. As many know, Matt works at Google and often has something interesting to tell us.
In this post, Matt answers some questions about pagerank. I made the following selection of answers that I found interesting:
Will the data centers using the slightly older infrastructure be updated in due course, or will my PR be split by data center for the next couple of months?
The latter. I think most data centers are running the newer infrastructure for things like info:, related:, link: and PageRank, and I believe every data center that has that newer infrastructure has the recent snapshot of PageRank now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took at least 1-2 months for the other data center IPs to get the newer infrastructure in some way. (Yes, this is smaller, different infrastructure than the stuff that made site: queries have more accurate results estimates.)
The fact that Google can only create a PR update that is a full quarter behind the times is awfully troubling.
I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users (see the question below for more details on the timing).
Will this PR update affect SERPs? Are we going to have also a SERP data refresh / update?
Great question. By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.
So, having read the last answer. Why exactly is everybody always that excited during the Google Dance?