UK PR moving - strange things with BL's

All my PR's have changed this morning (based in the UK) - all main pages up 4 to 5 or 3 to 4 for recent sites which is great however google is showing less backlinks, even though more backlinks have been set up, (over the past 4 weeks, only 1 or 2 are new enough not to show up). Went from 45 backlinks to 33 up to 34 and have now dropped to 21!

Any suggestions as to why good backlinks from themed sites are disappearing would be interesting.

All the other search engines, Hotbot, Altavista, Alltheweb show more accurate indications of actual backlinks and show them almost as they happen.

I have noticed during the last two updates that google traces the links but not counts them immediately while they are counted for allinanchor and then they are shows as backlinks but no PR benefit which comes at the next update. For example i added an FAQ page last month at the left menu and that means it was linked from all the main pages including home page. After the last update google had shown 18 backlinks for it( all Pr 4 and 5) and still not PR and now today it shows PR 5 for this page.

Thanks for the reply - I read it with interest and it makes sense - although in the past hour my bl's went back up to 34! Obviously stuff going on here in UK / Europe today. Very happy though with higher PR and moving up in the SERPs for top keywords.

I also think it is interesting that the UK appears to have PR updates several days behind the US.

Has anyone else noticed this? It would not be unusual given they are a US company.

Do other parts of the world update before or after us?

MSN is now PR10 for me in the UK!

How do you check MSN PR? I rank highly in their SERPs for my keywords but do not check PR on MSN at the moment - not another toolbar I hope!

I didn't mean MSNPR, I mean www.MSN.com is PR10

Hi Matrix28 - I realised this after I posted - not had enough coffee this morning yet or something!

Google.co.uk updates at the same time as the rest of Google. It just depends which datacentre is currently feeding google.co.uk. At this moment there are at least 6 datacentes that don't have the new PR/Backlinks showing. The update propogate slowly through the datacentres which is the reason why we see fluctuations.

I am sure I have seen a consistent lag for the uk - 3 to 4 days behing the US, unless they use the same datacentre to update the UK every time, or is there a datacentre in Europe? Although there does seem to be a lot of PR movement everywhere today looking at forum posts.

BL's are back down to 21, I expect they will go up and down all day.

I've never seen a consistant lag for google.co.uk, it's purely random. The location of the servers is unimportant, and they don't always use the same server to provide results to Google.co.uk.

The apparent movment is dependent on which datacentre provides the results, that can change second by second. Once all the datacentres have the same data it'll settle down. Until then, hang on .

Probably just my imagination! Thanks for the reply Derryt.

I am more concerned about the disappearing backlinks, currently have about 60 PR4 or above backlinks but have dropped to 21 from 34 today on google, although my PR has gone up. I think it will stabilise at 34 later today but had hoped it would increase given all the work I have done in this area. Most of these backlinks have been established for several weeks.