Real Time Google Page Rank?
Everyone seems to agree that Google indexes web pages on a regular interval. This can be shown by uploading a new page to an active directory and checking Google’s cache until it appears. On larger sites it may only take a few minutes to be added to Google’s database. But how long does it take to get page rank, and does Google preform real time page rank?
Depending on when you publish your page, this means you may have to wait anywhere from 1 to 120 days to find out what its page rank is. What is much debated though is how often Google actually recalculates page rank. For some reason lots of people are under the impression that at any any given time Google knows your exact current page rank.
In this article I will give my opinion on why real time page rank is not possible. There are countless reasons why it can never be real time or even achieved with only marginal latency. Below are just a few of the less debatable aspects.
First lets assume there is no latency between Goggle’s data centers, and they have arrays that can crunch the numbers in a few seconds/minutes. Now you publish a page at a.com. Google sees the new page and domain and gives you a 0PR. 5 minutes later b.com which carries a PR5 backlinks to your site. How long before Google sees the backlink and correctly updates your PR? To further complicate the issue what if b.com picks up 10000 relevant backlinks and jumps to PR6? The pagerank formula is too dynamic to afford real time page rank assignment. Snapshots are required which would make the data static before the formula can be run.
Second look modern hardware limitations. Even if every data center was running arrays of IBM Blue Gene super computers writing to U640s drives there would be too much information and resource demand for real time page rank. While Google maybe able to index sites in only a few minutes this is achieved over a massive array of servers scattered across the globe. The simple fact there are 30,000,000,000+ web pages and only so many FLOPS of processing power available shows that a PR update requires anywhere from several hours to weeks.
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All of this is not saying that Google does not do some of this to limit analysis of the algorithm. If Google could do real time page rank updates I doubt they would as many others have said. It would lead to abuse and make the system too predictable. In short just because you can does not mean you should. But based on current technology and architecture and my 10+ years working on volvospeed and other sites I do not feel real time page rank updates are possible.
Tags: google, page rank, pagerank, real time, servers, u640