steveb - 12:24 am on Mar 10, 2004 (gmt 0)

"It is much more likely that the majority of link pages have always passed low or invisible PR."

Just because you have not done any tests doesn't mean others haven't.

I personally was very skeptical about this in the fall because I found exceptions. It became obviously a reason for concern the next update as the percentages seemed reversed, very few links pages showed up. I saw I wasn't getting benefit I should, and that I wasn't delivering what I should. So I changed the pages, poof, next update everything is as it should be. My pages are showing as backlinks and passing PR, and two sites I contacted who also changed are giving me powerful links now instead of nothing.

BigDave's (to try to agree with him on this...) point is important to consider, but something we can't be sure about. Google's algorithm basically can do anything it wants. It can say if a links.htm page has less than twenty links, is on .gov domain, has x% words not in hyperlinks, etc., that this page will show as a backlink and pass PR. But that is a much more complex situation, which frankly isn't worth considering for most people. The quick and dirty fix of changing a page name, or contacting webmasters who give you a key link that doesn't show, these are easy and waste an appropriate amount of time on what should be a minor page on a domain.

The most basic thing is there is no reason to name a new page links.tld and plenty reason to name it anything else under the sun. The next basic thing to understand is that Google has simplistically made a move toward addressing a major issue for them: separating the influence of genuine "voting" linking from baloney-pure-seo linking. This is a very sticky issue, and we should expect to see more algorithmically complex "solutions" to the problem from Google in the future, despite the rather dippy first step they took. So... changing a page may do you no good in the long run, but it probably will help you three weeks from now.