|
neveremail - another quote for ya from Google rep:
One thing that I noticed in the first 300 posts or so was a discussion about whether backlinks or PageRanks were also being updated at the same time. In general, I wouldn't fixate too much on backlinks or PageRank during an update. The external backlinks/PR that we show have at least a couple factors that complicate analysis. First off, they are a snapshot in time, and the actual backlinks/PageRank used for ranking are from a different time interval. Another complicating factor is that we don't show every backlink on Google; we only show a subset of the backlinks we have internally. [One of the things we needed to do on our webmaster pages revamp was to go back and make sure it's clear that we only show a sampling of the backlinks we know about, not all backlinks.] The snapshotting + asynchronous nature + subsampling actions means that it's pretty hard to trace the reason for a ranking change back to a particular exported view of backlinks or PageRank. This is an area where I wouldn't read as much into the particular backlinks or PageRank that you see at any particular instant in time. Also, if a backlink or PageRank external update happened at the same time as ranking changes, I wouldn't read too much into how closely in time they happen together.
Just as a guide for people who don't eat and breathe WebmasterWorld, we typically show new backlink sample sets every 3-5 weeks or so. We have a bank of machines that computes PageRank continuously (and continually, I suppose; I wasn't an English major), but we only export new visible PageRanks every 3-4 months or so.
|