[PageRank]

  What's writing Matt Cutts in his blog about the PageRank?
 
 

More info on PageRank

 
  October 2, 2006

   in Google/SEO

Every few months we update the PageRank data that we show in the toolbar, and every few months I see a few repeated questions, so let me take a pass at some of them. Note: I wrote this kinda quickly, so I think this is pretty good, but if I spot something incorrect later, I’ll change it.

Philipp Lenssen asks: “Matt, I often wonder, how is the PageRank value stored internally, is it a floating-point number as many people suggest or is it just the integer value itself due to the heavy recursive PR computations?”

It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.

viggen says: “Do i need to know that? What does it tell me when i know it? Why would i care? Meaning, what purpose has the Pagerank for the mom and pop site out there?”

viggen, I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me. 

Andrew Hunter asks: “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.)

Lots of folks ask questions like: “Is this PageRank from day X or day Y? And it looks like backlinks are from day Z?”

Really, I wouldn’t worry about it–I’m not even sure myself. At some point we take our internal PageRanks, put them on a 0-10 scale, and export them so that they’re visible to Google Toolbar users. If you’re splitting hairs about the exact date that backlinks were taken from, you’re probably suffering from “B.O.” (backlink obsession) and should stop and go do something else for a bit until the backlink obsession passes. I highly recommend keyword analysis, looking at server logs to figure out new content to add, thinking of new hooks to make your site attract more word-of-mouth buzz, pondering how to improve conversion once visitors land on your site, etc.

I’ll do a follow-up. Supplemental Challenged said: “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).

Matt Crouch asks: “Actually, I am just curious why you are bothering telling us about a new PR update…. is this the first time you ever did?”

Well asked, Matt Crouch; I’m not sure if I’ve given the official word on a PageRank export before. It’s not a big event here at Google. Frankly, I didn’t even know we’d done our 3-4 month-ish push of this data. When I saw people talking about it online, I went to check and see whether it was a real push or not. In the past few months, people have noticed when an engineer grabs an obscure data center and tinkers around with things like backlinks or info: queries (e.g. when “Update Pluto” got downgraded because it was just an engineer tinkering at one data center). So I figured I’d let people know that this was a real PageRank export and not just one person doing something. 

New Jersey SEO asked: “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.


http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-info-on-pagerank/

[PageRank]

 According to his website - "
                   About Me
Hi, my name is Matt Cutts and I joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. I’m currently the head of Google’s Webspam team.

Before Google, I worked on my Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky.

I wrote the first version of SafeSearch, which is Google’s family filter, and I’ve worked on search quality and webspam at Google for the last several years.

"


According to Wikipedia.org:

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google as well as webmaster issues in general, and is generally an outspoken and public face of Google.

Career

Cutts started his career in search when working on his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Matt got his Bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky and Master's degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His field of study was computer graphics and movement tracking, then moved into the field of information retrieval, and search engines after taking two required outside classes from the university's Information and Library Science department. He co-oped at United States Department of Defense. He did not complete the Ph.D. before moving to Google, but did acquire a master's degree.

Before working at the Search Quality group at Google, Cutts worked at the ads engineering group and SafeSearch, Google's family filter.There he earned the nickname "porn cookie guy" by giving his wife's homemade cookies to any Googler who provided an example of unwanted pornography in the search results.

Cutts is one of the co-inventors listed upon a Google patent related to search engines and web spam, which was the first to publicly propose using historical data to identify link spam.

In August 2006, Cutts allegedly admitted to using the identity GoogleGuy in posts to web related boards, though Cutts later said he was quoted out of context.

In November 2010, Cutts started a contest challenging developers to make Microsoft Kinect more compatible with the Linux operating system. At the time, Microsoft had stated that the use of Kinect with devices other than the Xbox 360 was not supported by them.


Links:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/about-me/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_cutts

[jimcarrey99]

Thanks for the post. Numbers of confusion are there on what basis page rank is been given to a website and how much it's going to effect our SERP ranking.


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