Why Toolbar PR is Not Important - More Mythology

[Julie11]

The higher your PR, the more content Google will index faster. The longer your load time, however, the less often Google will recrawl your content.

I'd not thought of this before but it makes sense - the longer the bots spend reading one page the less time they have for the rest of the web.

[kevsta]

"real" PR as opposed to toolbar is still very much a ranking factor IMO, and it's a multiplier, so if everything else was equal, small differences in real PR could mean big ranking differences in the charts.

not that we can track it or know the values.. however you can usually get a feel for a "real" ish level of PR by assessing optimization levels and serp performance, and when combined with the vaguest of ideas from what the toolbar says it gives an overall feel of what to expect.

for example you can generally look at a SERP where page one is all toolbar PR4 and 5 sites and pretty much know that your 3 month old (tb)PR1 isnt going to cut it there any time soon. If there is a (tb) PR1 site in that SERP you can be fairly confident it's real PR level is somewhat above what the TB shows.

total disinformation on the toolbar has been the norm for some time now.

anyone unfamiliar with PR and rankings should read this

Remember, PageRank alone cannot get you high rankings. We’ve mentioned before that PageRank is a multiplier; so if your score for all other factors is 0 and your PageRank is twenty billion, then you still score 0 (last in the results). This is not to say PageRank is worthless, but there is some confusion over when PageRank is useful and when it is not.

[cyclob]

PR toolbar is not quite accurate as well. I'm using Firefox and seems like toolbar PR doesn't always shows up, I need to refresh or sometime compare with IE.

[deepsand]

In this post by Matt Cutts:

Straight from Google: What You Need to Know

Read the 14th Slide. It is a graph that tells us that: Google crawl rate increases as PR increase.

However, that is not to say that PR causes a faster crawl rate, but only that there is a positive correlation.

What is not shown, but is known, is that crawl rate is driven by the frequency with which content changes.

Now, it is reasonable to deduce that the latter results in an increase in popularity, which in turn results in a higher PR, such that it is actually the rate of change in content which yields a positive correlation between both crawl rate and PR, thus resulting in the same between the latter.

I.e., the correlation between PR and crawl rate may be effect rather than cause.

[thersey]

Myths and Myth-conceptions are on my mind. I found myself in another forum this evening, and there was a sticky with this title: Toolbar PR and WHY it is NOT important

And it starts out:



I didn't realize PR has anything to do with crawl. Am I wrong? Maybe there is a correlation?

Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any of these factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites. So, it's not completely based on PR of the site...

[zbreeze]

It is not quite important but at least I think it can be an indicator of the page performance, more or less.

[deepsand]

It is not quite important but at least I think it can be an indicator of the page performance, more or less.

How is a probability function related to performance?