Added unique content and PR drops

[newreality]

Recently I added about 28 pages of unique content, text intensive, to a 15 page site that's been going for a couple years.

It was PR4 and right after adding these pages it drops to PR3.

Site has decent mapping/internal links.

Why is this?

[AussieWebmaster]

The initial pages have yet to gain inbound love most likely and they share the existing PR of the overall site thus home page. It will come back if the new content gains some inbound links

[Webmaster T]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

they share the existing PR of the overall site thus home page.

Huh, this is only the case if the pages are linked to from the home page therefore reducing the PR passed down the site hierarchy. Adding new pages should increase PR on all pages they link to on or off the site. There is no such animal as site PR, PR is calculated based on the page. In fact adding new pages actually increase the PR passed as PR does not distinguish between on or offsite just incoming and outgoing.

[ScottG]

Hi Webmaster T,

From what I gather PR is calculated all the time. Whether this daily, weekly, monthly, etc. only Google knows. Although I'd last read that this is calculated on a daily basis.

It is generally known that the data pushed to the tool bar is not 1:1. Meaning, the PR stats might be fairly current or several months out of date. So any changes you've currently made to your site may not actually affect -visible- PR for days/weeks/months, depending on the next push from Google to the public PR server.

It sounds weird, but the data is fairly degraded in the eyes of most and used more for a conversation piece around Google rather than a strong measure. And for others... a means to sell links. Who doesn't want a link from a PR 9 site...wink wink nudge nudge. But the site's true PR might be say 2, the revised PR just hadn't been published. So, until that catches, up they're selling as many links as they can.

And even the true "value" of PR in terms of how this figure adds into the overall score of your page to rank, is hotly debated. And different data centers can have different tweaks on the scoring knobs to see how visitors perceive the rankings... Thus you might have a PR1 site outrank a PR8 site because 1) PR is out of date and/or 2) other factors outweigh the PR score in order to create a high ranking page.

[Webmaster T]

ScottG, regardless of when calculated and toolbar PR. My point was the PR formula seems to indicate that any page anywhere pointing at a page passes it's PR to that page whether on site or off making AussieWebmaster's post very confusing since he was saying the page needed IBLs to pass PR which IMO, is neither provable or factual. Ie: all it does is confuse the confused further.

[JohnW]

>very confusing since he was saying the page needed IBLs to pass PR

Not sure that's exactly what he said. Anyhow the suggestion that new content needs to gain some inbound "link love" seems right to me.

[ScottG]

Speaking of PR...
http://sphinn.com/story/74952
"Matt Cutts posted the following comment on his blog on September 24, 2008: "I wouldn’t be surprised if new PageRanks started showing up this weekend or so."

[steve6]

Should we avoid adding content then if its not necessary?

[raviverma]

Originally Posted by steve6

Should we avoid adding content then if its not necessary?

Steve, spiders like content (fresh content). so, its better to have more content.

[pradeep]

Out of hundred of algorithms Google follows, Pagerank is one among them. So a pagerank is a rank to a page and not to website. Even pagerank has many factors to give a rank to a page. However as said by 'Webmaster T' it is the matter of incoming and outgoing links to a page.

[j0nyDzine]

So, not wanting to get into the big argument about how exactly PR is equated... BUT...
interestingly, a site I was updating a site that I had neglected a bit the last few months, taking care of any broken links, and updating about 30 articles, lots of link updates throughout the site... and what do you know... my PR5 site just fell to a 4 in the last few weeks or so after...
THAT is a first...
Wonder if something got changed or if things are still being figured out in some dark Google dungeon...