<RK> as Internal Live PR; Evidence and Findings
March 27 update
In Matt Cutts latest post:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/q-a-thread-march-27-2006/:
Q: Is the RK parameter turned off, or should we expect to see it again?
A: I wouldn’t expect to see the RK parameter have a non-zero value again.Q: What’s an RK parameter?
A: It’s a parameter that you could see in a Google toolbar query. Some people outside of Google had speculated that it was live PageRank, that PageRank differed between Bigdaddy and the older infrastructure, etc.
So my assumption that it is now put to zero because they were not supposed to be public seem to be valid.
Well, it was funny as it lasted.
March 25 update
Matt Cutts of Google read this article and also posted a funny comment on this post.
I was very curious and so of course I sent him an e-mail.
His answer:
I’m sorry, I can’t shed light on that at this time.
Best wishes though,
Matt
Matt, hope you are ok that I post this , anyways I give here my theory:
The RK “Internal Live PR” values were not supposed to be public and thus Google put them now all to 0.
/ Jim
March 24 update
Google has now put all RK values to zero for all URLs.
Either some temporary glitch OR Google didn’t like that value to be public …
Let’s wait and see.
/ Jim
Original Article
————————–
“PR prediction tools”
In may 2004 the checksum algorithm that Google is using to query a site’s PageRank from it’s servers were cracked and released here.
This spread across the internet and the code was translated into PHP. People started to write scripts to get the PR value without a toolbar and even though Google changed their checksum algorithm it was shortly cracked again. Then the popular PageRank prediction tools started to emerge from different places.
All these tools does not work as nobody fully understood what it is, not even the tool creaters.
The discovery
In a WebmasterWorld thread of Feb 12, 2006 a member asked what the mysterious figures such as Rank_1:1:6 Rank_1:1:5 Rank_1:1:4 that are displayed in one of the “PR prediction” tools when clicking “check” actually meant.
The discussion starts in the thread and another member (arran) posts that if you drop &features=Rank from the URL you get an XML feed, visible here.
It was also found out that you can add &start=0&num=10 at the end of the URL (protellix) to get a start and finish with more listings and that you could replace Rank in the &features=Rank part of the URL and instead use one of the following features (phish):
- CacheSize
- Filter
- Hostname
- Level
- Link
- Rank
- Results
- Summary
- Title
- URL
We realised that this XML feed is in fact a search query of the Google SERPs.
In message 75 of that thread, member Hanu posts a script that has the checksum decoder built in and will get the XML feed including any of the above features. I will not post this tool here as it violates Google’s TOS.
Anyway, when using that tool:
- uncheck info:
- leave Features empty
- set Start: to 0 and Num: to 100 and
- type any query into Query: or a site: command of your site.
- Optionally, put 64.233.179.104 into the Host: field in order to see the BigDaddy results.
That will display the XML feed of the SERP in a standard way with 100 results on a BigDaddy datacenter. Kudus to Hanu for this tool!
Don’t use toolbarqueries.google.com as Google is using a DNS-based load balancing and it is like getting a random DC servered to you (same when you check SERPs in Google.com btw), so use the IP number of a DC.
Explaining the SERP XML Feed
Let’s look at the above XML example.
This is what the abbrevations mean according to Google XML Tag Definitions, an official Google document:
- <gsp VER=”3.2″> GSP = “Google Search Protocol”, Provides an encapsulation for all data returned in the Google XML search results
- <tm> – Total server time to return search results, measured in seconds.
- <q> – The search query submitted to the Google search engine to generate these results.
- <param> – The input parameters submitted to the Google search engine to generate these results.
- <res SN=”1″ EN=”10″> – In simple english the start and finish of the SERP listings for the query, controlled by &start=0&num=10 in the URL.
- <m> – The estimated total number of results for the search.
- <fi /> – Indicates that document filtering was performed during this search. Note: See the section on Automatic Filtering for more details
- <nb> – Navigation data for next and previous results
- <pu> – Previous results
- <nu> – Next results
- <r N=”1″> – Provides encapsulation for the details of an individual search result. A SERP listing in other words. N is the rank of the SERP listing, L if it is indented (2) or not (1). Note: Currently this value will always be 1 unless directory crowding occurs. In this case, the second directory result will have a value of 2.. Read that link btw, interesting data on filtering and dup content.
- <u> – The URL of the search result.
- <ue> – No data found, same as URL.
- <t> – The title of the search result.
- <rk> – Provides a general rating of the relevance of the search result
- <s> – Search result snippet for the search result.
- <lang> – Language of the SERP listing.
- <has> – Provides encapsulation for any special features supported for this search request. This is in other words the last line of the SERP listing. It has the URL, cache data, cache size, cache ID, supplemental results and related pages.
It is the <rk> here that is interesting. Some recent “PR predictions tools” or “Live PageRank tools” has been using this value in their tools.
By looking at various SEO forums now during the PR update we see that it is those kind of tools that are most liked and accurate, but not 100% accurate – usually 1 value higher and I found the reason.
Observations and testings of RK to see if it is Live PR
By looking at Matt Cutts different blog posts with tools that shows you the PR value of multiple datacenters we see that the PR that is now in the process of being exported to the toolbars across 40+ DCs is dated between feb 4-7, 2006 which is around 20 days ago.
I was then using a tool that shows you the RK values for an URL across 40+ DCs on the more recent blog posts by Cutts and I found some incredible things.
Matt Cutts post from (Feb 17) shows as RK 3 on the DCs that found it and nothing on the rest, see the results from the tool here. A post from feb 15 shows as RK 6 on half DCs and RK 3 on the other half, see it yourself.
This means that the RK values are updated regularly.
And now this:
On those DCs that the RK of the blog post was 6 compared to those it was 3 he ranked higher in the SERPs!
- Example 1:
Difference in RK: 6 compared to 3
Name of post: “WSJ on SEO contests”
Date blogged: feb 15
Query used: WSJ SEO contest
Difference in rank: 3 compared to 5. - Example 2:
Difference in RK: 7 compared to 6
Name of post: “Road trip: Ask Jeeves in Campbell”
Date blogged: feb 13
Query used: ask jeeves Albuquerque
Difference in rank: 3 compared to 5.
Why older blog posts by Cutts has higher RK? GoogleBot has not yet found the the many RSS feeds and links that are linking to his posts (most probably).
I have also seen the RK values changing by the day and according to the person that made the LivePR tool he has been saying RK values increasing the same day as Google is caching new backlinks on that particular datacenter!
If you do search queries in the tool that Hanu provided you will see that the RK value is static and the same – no matter which query you use.
BidDaddy and non-BigDaddy RK values
The recent PR tools that uses the RK uses the BigDaddy datacenters, and those are usually 1-2 values higher than the toolbar PR. And by using this tool we see that there is a also a different RK value on the BigDaddy datacenters then the rest of the datacenters. Reason for this has to do with the new infrastructure but I don’t know what.
I will update here later when I find out.
Difference of toolbar RK and SERP RK
I found something else very interesting.
Look at this article explaining how the PageRank toolbar works. After information is sent to a Google server, data in the form of an XML document with data about the URL is sent back.
There are values and info on a lot of things and guess what the field of the value of the PR is called?
<RK>
The same name as the SERP XML, but in the SERP XML the RK is not the toolbar PR, just has the same name.
Google definition of RK
Let’s look at the definition of <rk> from Google.
From their official “Google XML Reference“:
“Provides a general rating of the relevance of the search result”
Where does this come from? Seem total wacko, and yes it is a mistake.
First of all it is the XML document for the Google Search Appliance not the general search API.
I found a very interesting document from Google called: “Google’s Search Results Protocols“, hosted by some guy that mirrors controversial and important documents “that is in danger of censorship”.
And there it says:
Definition of RK:
“Google’s rating of how good a single search result is”
But check this:
In that same document it defines what is a “single search result”.
And it says:
“R – A single search result – Contains a U; an optional T; an RK; any number of F’s; an optional S; and a HAS”
That is the SERP XML!
Every SERP listing in the XML starts with an <R>.
The old definition of R as per that same docuement is:
“A single search result”
The new definition from Google XML Tag Definitions is:
“Provides encapsulation for the details of an individual search result”
So the guy that wrote the new version of this document now called “Google XML Reference”, earlier called “Google’s Search Results Protocols” translated RK:
From:
“Google’s rating of how good a single search result is”
To:
“Provides a general rating of the relevance of the search result”
Which is total wrong, the person didn’t see there was a special definition for “single search result”.
And this has caused headaches for SEOs ever since …
A “single search result” is meant to be a listing in the SERP.
Which means that RK is:
“Google’s rating of how good a listing in the SERP is”
Which is: PageRank!
To further prove the point:
Old version:
U – The URL of a single search result
T – The title of a single search result
RK – Google’s rating of how good a single search result is
New version:
U – The URL of the search result
T – The title of the search result
RK – Provides a general rating of the relevance of the search result
The RK is a static value and has nothing to do with relevance, check yourself.
What does RK stand for?
My theory:
It is Rank. Why?
The RK values shows up on “&features=Rank“.
PR is not a Google official abbreviation, it is something SEOs made up. They have PageRank and use the Rank part of the word, simple.
Checking the example above of Cutts blog posts shows that those DCs that has higher RK has a higher Rank as well.
What we now know
There are 3 kind of values.
-
Toolbar PR – Updates each 3-4 month and on the latest update the value exported is around 20 days old.
BigDaddy RK values – Updates probably daily, is seen to be usually higher than the toolbar PR values – a new PR calculation?
Non-BigDaddy RK values – Reflects toolbar PR very well.
If RK is not the internal PR, which I now believe, it must be something that is very close to being it.
What we now can do with this if RK is live internal PR
- See the live internal PR instantly for a any URL, there is already a FF plugin with a toolbar for RK here (but a few things on it needs to be fixed).
- Track RK values to see what happens to backlinks on an almost daily basis.
- See dates when particular DCs are updating.
- Make some excellent tools.
And more
Questions remaining
- If RK is internal live PR – why no decimals on the numbers? Low or high PR 8 is a huge difference.
Update of this article
I will update this article regularly as soon I find more evidence and findings. Please also comment so I get more info.
The article is discussed on cre8asite forums here.
And the original discovery thread on WMW from message 151, here.
I think this is very interesing.
Jim Westergren is a company owner from Sweden who lives together with his wife and son. Some of his interests are SEO, web development, writing and
Where you say… “Where does this come from? Seem total wacko, and yes it is a mistake.”
It’s not a mistake, you’re looking at the XML document for the Google Mini and Google Search Appliance. RK is sent back with each search result within a set, and it is indeed a general rating of the relevance of the search results, within the index that the appliance has.
Very interesting that the general search API can send it back if you trigger it.
Paul,
that is very interesting and you are right, it is the XML document for the Google Search Appliance not the general search API.
Then the RK definition for the general search API should be:
“Google’s rating of how good a single search result is”
and definition of “single search result” is R (as described in the article)
A question for you that deal with GSA, the RK numbers there are they static? IE same for any type of query you use? Or different based on the relevance of the query?
I am revising the article a bit now.
Jim this may be of use…..
My friends site had a canonical error in Google and Google had assigned
the pr (7) and the back links of a very large Career Finder Site (one of the largest)to her site.
When this happened she had a pr of 7 (some toolbar queries still show that). But the back links have been fixed and now on almost all DC’s and through the live pr value it shows a pr 3 in the Big Daddy DC’s and a pr 0 in non Big Daddy. The site is only two or three months old hand has basically no marketing so the PR is gotta be correct in the live pr tool.
Also before the canonical error was fixed when I put links at the bottom of the site it to my sites they skyrocketed, assuming Google thought they were coming from The Large Authority PR 7. Now the new links I have placed since it has been fixed are not getting indexed or are doing very little if anything.
So maybe through the canonical errors being fixed in this last PR update a few weeks ago it tells us that the RK value is truly Live or True Page Rank.
Thanks a lot for the data. It certainly adds more credits to my theory.
Thanks for the nice article and i checked live pagerank using http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ but what really amazed me was that why is the rank for http://www.a1whs.com different from http://www.a1whs.com/index.php . I do not have index.html on the server so why does index.php page shows a N/A Real Pagerank whearas the domain shows RPR of 5. I wanted to put the html code from above site on mine but due to above stated reason cannot put it cause it just displays RPR as N/A on index.php . Does anyone have a reason for the same and possible solution also?
cheers
http://www.a1whs.com is a different URL from http://www.a1whs.com/index.php and so has different PR values.
The reason for the N/A is an error in the tool because it cannot find the URL in the XML feed and I just checked and Google does not have the index.php version in the index, so in this case it is not even an error.
You have RK 5, good.
Oh one more thing that disturbes me is why does http://www.a1whs.com has different RK than http://a1whs.com (happens to be N/A again). And is there a way to get rid of these N/A errors ? Plus in which manner can RK5 help?
Again, they are different URLs and so has a different PR/RK value.
RK will not help you anything. It can be used by SEOs to make some good measurements.
Do SEOS use Alexa results also or just rely on PR and RK most of the time?
Cbin
That is very intresting regarding the site that had PR7 and the backlinks of another site.
What was the other sites rank (PR and serp) during this time ?
Now that the PR7 has gone from your friends site have the serp positions already gone down ? – or I wonder if this will follow.
To me – I do agree that Big Daddy does seem to be correctly calculating a possible PR value, but I have not seen either crawling activity or serp positions that suggest this PR has been applied to the site internally yet.
Dayo_UK
Interesting questions.
About your last paragraph, more observation/testing will be done by me to establish this. I hope I can get to that soon.
Jim
I would be intrested in your findings – as I am 100% sure that RK is probably PR, and Google seems to be correctly calculationg these values on the Big Daddy DCs and Google has not correctly calculated my homepage PR for a long long while – eg internal pages have higher PR than the homepage, split PR on non-www and www etc – but on Big Daddy those RK values look right for PR.
However, ranking and crawling has not changed as yet – It seems that all the ingredients are there at Big Daddy but the end results is still not what it should be.
As you may have seen at WMW – lots of sites have gone supplimental only except the homepage.
Big Daddy just feels like it is not up to speed on a few issues – the application of internal PR (RK) could be one of them.
Cheers
Dayo
Sorry but i am lost who is this bigdaddy and what is wmw?
Dayo_UK
The sites I placed the links to are still dominating, while they were getting the PR7 link I was axiously ingaged in getting other links so that when it stopped, the sites would have good links to stand on. Since then the sites in question are in the top 2 for most of their words and have done nothing but moved up.
As far as the Career site honestly I was so focused on testing out the error I never looked at the cache or pr of the actual site with the error. After the update and when it was fixed they went to a Live and Displayed PR 8.
On another note, if you look at the live pr of MSN and Yahoo they both have PR 10’s. Could this be Google internally accepting the great importance of these sites, but that they will never admit it or show it?
Cbin
Thanks – how about your friends site that was showing a PR7 and now looks like a corrected PR3 – did the site lose it serp positions recently ?
MSN and Yahoo used to be PR10 in the olden days.
Cheers
Dayo
Dayo_UK
They actually didn’t get that great of rankings during the mix up because Google wasn’t caching them, when you did a cache: or site: search for the homepage it would bring up the career site. But I had them place anchored links to their subpages and that helped them move up. But they did not benefit has much as the other sites I placed links to. I guess I need to take her out to lunch. (But a live and displayed pr 3 for a 4 week old site in a small little niche with very little bl’s isn’t to shabby either)
Hi Jim,
Excuse the delay in replying, I had to do some fiddling around to find the answer to this:
“A question for you that deal with GSA, the RK numbers there are they static? IE same for any type of query you use? Or different based on the relevance of the query?”
It’s different based on the relevance of the query. On limited testing, I’ve found a page which is ranked ‘0′ for one query, but ‘5′ for another.
Cheers
Paul
GSA Developer – also posted this question on your site:-
So results are returned in a relevacy order by default.
So if you choose to display the value you will get results like this ?:-
First Title
First Desc
First URL – 5
Second Title
Second Desc
Second Url – 4
etc
So the seems to directly reflect the relevancy in a relevancy search ? – or can an of 2 show higher than an of 4 in a relevancy ordered search ?
a1whs.com
Big Daddy is a new infastructure Google is putting in place accross its DataCenters – more can be read here:-
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy
WMW is Webmasterworld.
Cheers.
Jim
There is now no doubt in my mind that RK refer to PR.
Intresting enough if you do an info:domain.com query you will see that the RK exactly matches what is displayed on the toolbar….
Eg:-
http://66.249.93.104/search?client=navclient-auto&ch=61980607857&q=info:webmasterworld.com
Shows an RK of 7 as per the PR – exact matches on every single domain/page I have checked so far.
As we know this and other Big Daddy DCs are indicating that Webmasterworld may become an RK of 8. Whether there is a slightly different scoring for serp checks I dont know – but the RK tag is definetly indicating PR IMO. Whether this is a calculation and being applied to the serps or just a calculation of the PR at this stage – I am not sure.
As I have said I have a site showing RK of 5 in the serps but info:domain.com still shows RK of 0 – whether these clash when it comes to ranking a page in the serps I am not sure.
Time will tell
Cheers
Dayo
Davo dude i didnt get what u mean by info:domain.com cause i get nothing when i type info:a1whs.com in google search where are you typing that ? And thanks stephan now i know who bigdaddy is its what jeffs kid call him
.
Oh sorry i forgot and since i cannot edit my old comments i forgot to mention to jim that now i see pr for both http://www.a1whs.com and http://www.a1whs.com/index.php but it was not the case few weeks ago. And also now RK is not N/A anymore in FF plugin i installed it shows 3 instead of 5 on index.php. So is there anything can could shed more light on it as why it all the sudden changed from N/A for RK to 3 ?
Mindblowing!
hey guys,
Its a lovely place to find out about quite a few things its enriching.
I am working on the pagerank analizer thats what the effect that will be with the back link and automization of the process. if any one of u can give me some help with the back link process code of google , yahoo ect.. i would be very thank full.
have a nice time
s sinha
Now RK is continuously ZERO.
So imo it was real current Page Rank and now google has disappeared it for permanently.
Yes, true.
Well i am pretty said that now LPR is zero cause it was at 5 but still i only got a pr of 3 . So i am hoping maybe after 3 months i would have rank of 5 or higher.
I have checked it out and it is gone now! Everyone shows a live PR0. It was too good to last.
Great info all round Jim… The comments are so cool that they can make up for another article
Nicely done, Jim. Keep these articles coming!
this is interesting and complicated.
i got confused.. hehe
Another great article by Jim Westergren, I really Liked the LivePR tool: http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ :It’s a great tool to bookmark, for use every couple weeks.
I been using A PR prediction tool. But have been wondering why when I tpye My URL like this http://www.decent11hosing.com I get a prediction, but when I type it like this http://decent11hosing.com I get a different prediction.
It’s the same with the backlink checker I use, I type it both ways and get two different results.
It really comes down to which one I should be advertising if not both, and are they considered 2 different links by google even though it’s the same site or are both links consider two seperate websites by google.
Thanks any help would be Appreciated.
Great article. Helped to understand the PR thing. Keep it up.
There is some great information here, but unfortunately I didn’t find what I was looking for. Does anyone know where I can find a working php script that gets the PR but is designed to work on a 64 bit system? I have found a few and got only one to half work. It is a bit odd because it will get the PR for most websites but for the rest it will give an error. Can anyone help me please?
Cbin your case looks just like the one I had last year. I bought expired domain of which some .cgi subpages showed lots of PR7s,6s,5s and one index.cgi PR8. Confirmed by all known PR detection tools. Includo=ing one of the best – http://www.database-search.com/sys/pre-check-en.php
The cache was correct to. It must of been same type of google mixup though, because by itself subpages ranked top5 for some high keywords among only gov and edu sites for a long while but links from it did not show real power as one would expect from PR8 site and then it all was corrected and out of the index it went.That was the best $106 I spend at snapnames so far
I think google now play around something like webrank
not pagerank