So the update post to Friday’s Google Pagerank Update alert.

We’ll start with the usual disclaimer “Toolbar doesn’t matter yada yada yada..” and then cut to the chase , well actually, judging by the virtual hysteria on various forums,  it actually matters quite a lot,  to quite a lot of people. 

Everybody knows it’s unreliable, and no it isn’t the full picture, and yes you do get all sorts of random and erroneous figures from it from time to time, but to be fair they mostly do tend to correct themselves next time round.

As suspected our friend’s suspicious pagerank figures from the last time round have corrected themselves from an unlikely PR 5 to a far more likely (and justifiable by IBLs) PR1.

Analysis across the board of both our own and our client sites shows another pretty good update in general,  there’s only one client in particular who was hoping for a promotion from PR5-6 who will be disappointed no matter how much we explain the vagueness and often irrelevance to the actual SERP performance, but lets face it people like Pagerank.

..Google aren’t stupid, far from it, they know this, which is probably why the toolbar continues onwards in it’s present form.

But it’s the “snapshot” element of this that interests us most, because although “T3h Real PR“ updates daily, and is a much more accurate figure (available realtime to Google employees) they don’t want SEOs (or anyone) knowing too accurately what’s happening in realtime and so they take a snapshot of a while back

<<<———-  probably using this 

…and then every now and then they export that out to give the rest of us at least a vague idea of the level (a while back) ..Obviously, if you could place the snapshot date with any accuracy you’d have a much better idea of where you are.

Lately it has often seemed to us that the actual snapshot date was maybe more recent than the oft stated 8-12 weeks, but research this time is indicating to us that we think the snapshot date (for us) was between 19th & 25th May.

We’ve come to this conclusion by looking at a few blogs, but mainly our own,  and you can see that while this post SEO experiments has received the PR, the next one on the 24th May WordPress Theme Competition hasn’t, and everything thereafter remains greyed out.

On the spec ops blog we have a post from the 16th May that has received the PR package, and everything from the 22nd May onwards is still greyed out.

A quick look around some of our other favourite SEO blogs shows a post about competitive keywords with the gift of PR on the 20th May but nothing after that, so that would appear to suggest the 8 week period is still about right, for most of us, anyway…

On investigating (a little bit) further though, what is interesting, is that the cutoff date for the export appears maybe to be variable depending on of the level of domain PR?

i.e. for those of us with what Google would probably term “low” PRs it’s as above, but when you start looking at Blogs with higher Pageranks, this date seems to move forwards, we had a mosey around the likes of Boing Boing, Matt Cutt’s blog and a few others and they have posts from much later onwards than our seeming cutoff date showing either Toolbar greenery, or the white PR0 rather than the grey N/A reading.

Matt has a post about hacked sites on the 25th May with a PR4, and then although there was then nearly a month’s gap between posting, not returning again with a cat post until 24th June, all his June posts and in fact everything right up until the iPhone post on 19th July is showing the white PR0,  only from then on does it seem to be greyed out like the rest of ours.

So could it be that higher the domain PR, the later your relative cutoff date for the Toolbar export?

We know that higher PR sites are crawled more frequently, perhaps that higher Pagerank “pressure” just propagates though the site better, seeming to give a later cutoff point, or maybe it’s just because Matt just really knows what he’s doing with his blog, structure wise

Your thoughts / comments on Toolbar PR & export cutoff dates are more than welcome, because Telefonica are up to their usual tricks today with ultra slow loading pages and we’re not that bothered that we can be arsed to go through loads of blog posts to confirm this possible observation..   ..especially as it’s Sunday today, we’d rather someone else either confirm or rubbish this to be honest..

What we do know is that we would love to get a glimpse of the realtime live readings, we think Google should at least show us what the matrix looks like, even if not actually a glimpse of our own real figures… 

SEO on the beach team are off to the beach again, …over and out…