Real Page Rank, Toolbar PageRank & Directory PR - What is the Difference?

This article looks at the difference between Real Page Rank, toolbar PageRank and Google Directory PageRank.

In this article I explain the difference between Real PageRank and the PageRank displayed on the toolbar and in the Directory. Real PageRank that is the heart of Google's system for ranking web pages is alive and well and has been updated 4 times since the last toolbar update!

PageRank is a system developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for ranking the web pages that are in Google's index. While some are claiming that PageRank is going to be discontinued, Google currently states on their Google Technology webpage that "PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools."

PageRank is displayed on the Google toolbar and in the Google directory. The toolbar PR is a scale with 10 steps, while the directory PR is a scale with 7 steps. Both the toolbar and the directory display the PR as graphic bar. You can mouse over the toolbar graphic bar and it displays the PR in a tool tip but the directory only provides the graphic bar with no mouse over reading.

While Google is quite tight lipped about PageRank, the commonly held view is that the PR displayed on the toolbar and in the directory are only a scale of what many refer to as real or raw PageRank. It is the real PageRank that is a factor that is used to determine Google's order of results in all their search engines searches, not toolbar displayed PR. What we see on the toolbar and in the directory is derived from this real PageRank.

For this reason you will hear people referring to 3 different PageRanks and this can cause confusion. There is really only 1 Pagerank but it is displayed for the public to view in 2 different places, on the toolbar in a 10 step scale and in the directory using a 7 step scale. For more information on the 7 step scale in the Google directory read The Handy Dandy Google PageRank Figurin' Guide by Chris Raimondi.

The full range of actual or real PageRank is covers by a scale of 10 (or 11 depending on your position). The directories scale of 7 (or 8 depending on your position) also covers the full range of real Pagerank. But both the toolbar and the directory visible PageRank is just a number or graphic representation of the Real PageRank. A high value toolbar PR6 is the same value as a low value PR7 and a high value PR5 is the same value as a low value PR6.

Further the toolbar scale is logarithmic. This mean that as you move up the toolbar scale the range of real PageRank that each toolbar value contains increases.

The process Google uses to obtain PageRank is as follows. The Googlebot is sent out to crawl different URLs and it stores a copy of the pages in the Google storeserver. The storeserver then compresses and stores the web pages into a repository.

The indexer parses the web pages in the repository and stores the links in the anchors file. From this file the URL resolver generates the links database which is used for the real PageRank calculations and it is from this same links database that the displayed backlinks are calculated.

Google updates their backlinks about once a month. When the backlink update has been completed the number of backlinks displayed changes. At that point people will see a change in their webpage rankings as their new backlinks have been given credit. It is at this same time that Google updates the real PR.

As of February 03rd, there has not been a toolbar display PR update for 2782 days. This is the longest time between toolbar updates on recorded. During this time the backlinks and real PageRank have been updated 4 or 5 times and the directory displayed PR has been updated once.

Now you are probably thinking just like me. When is the next toolbar update going to happen! There has been alot of talk about Google going to quartely toolbar updates. If this is the case and your PR needs a shot in the arm to make your reciprocal links page more attractive, or to get a deeper Googlebot crawl on your database of forsale items, this may be the time to check out the text link ad sales.

More information can be found on the Page Rank Update List on the history of the toolbar updates for the last 4 years.

Bob Mutch Sept/2004