Changing Google Toolbar Datacenter to Show Newest PR

[Admin]

Changing Google Toolbar Datacenter



Many webmasters use the Google Toolbar to do various things such as display Pagerank when browsing. This is rather handy as it shows the current Pagerank of a page when you browse it, giving you an idea of it's authority.

However.. During a Pagerank update, the default Toolbar Datacenter is quite often the very last one to update. This is refered to as the TBPR update, or rather the Tool Bar Page Rank Update.

The time it takes from the very first datacenter Pagerank update, until the Google Toolbar updates can quite often take days or even a week or so depending on how satisfied the Google Engineers are with the values and dataset.

Alot of webmasters can't wait to see how the Pagerank is distributed throughout their website. The update only occurs on average every 3 months and people often resort to online tools to query their sites URL's one at a time to get the newly awarded values.

Well here is the solution for the impatient amongst us. Once you have identified which Google Datacenter is displaying the new values, you can change which Datacenter your Toolbar queries to get these new values delivered to your Toolbar as you browse.

Note 25th July 2008:

The updated datacenter to use for this update is: 209.85.173.147

To identify changing Datacenters, i recommend Mongs site http://www.digpagerank.com where you can query every one of Google's Datacenters for a URL's pagerank value. The "Vibrant" Datacenters are the one's Mong has identified as the most likely to change first, so start with these then move on to different IP blocks.

Right, once you have found a Datacenter with fresh pagerank values it's time to modify your Toolbar.

In Windows XP, Click Start then Run and type or Copy & Paste the following:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

If you are running a system other than Windows XP, your HOSTS file can be found at the following locations:

Linux/Unix /etc/hosts
Windows 3.1/95/98/ME c:\windows\hosts
Windows NT/2000/XP Pro c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Windows XP Home c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Netware SYS:ETC/HOSTS
Apple System Folder:Preferences and in the System Folder itself.

Open your HOSTS file in Notepad, it's like a regular .txt file.

Then at the very bottom of the file paste:

127.0.0.1 localhost
123.123.123.123 toolbarqueries.google.com

Now all you have to do is modify the 123.123.123.123 and replace it with the IP number from the Datacenter we identified on Digpagerank.com

Then simply click File >> Save As and overwrite your original.

Now your Google Toolbar will query this Datacenter allowing you to surf URL's checking out the new Pagerank values. If you want to reverse this after the update, simply re-open your HOSTS file and delete the 2 lines you added and Save the file again.

Simple, now there's no need to manually query individual URL's to see the new Pagerank values.

http://www.digalexa.com is another good site for alexa.