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Any ideas?
My geocities site, for example, has a PR of 4 with only a handful of external links to it. But one of those links is a directory listing w/ PR5.
"It's our idea and so naturally we deserve PR10" :)
Honestly though I think they must have configured it so their sites always show very high ranks because it looks really embarassing if your system to rank the importance of sites says you are less important than your competitors.
dwilson there are a number of posts about Geocities PR - the general conclusion was that what you see through the toolbar is not a true PR but rather a guess-timated PR based on a number of factors.
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- Tony
[edited by: Dreamquick at 2:27 pm (utc) on Mar. 13, 2003]
some would even argue a PR11:
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I don't doubt for a second that they have a really high PR naturally, if you consider how many places reference Google on a daily basis then at least a few of those must have a high PR and from front page links too.
However I wouldn't put it past them to have given themselves a little PR bonus to ensure that anyone who wanted to get higher than them had to put more work into it than they had.
...and yes I thought I saw that PR11 too!
- Tony
dwilson there are a number of posts about Geocities PR - the general conclusion was that what you see through the toolbar is not a true PR but rather a guess-timated PR based on a number of factors.
This is a little off the thread topic, but: that's true of new pages that aren't yet in the index -- they get a "guessed" toolbar PR just like those anywhere else, and appear to have an exceptionally high one because of geocities' PageRank. But once they're indexed, just like any other page, their real PageRank will be calculated and displayed.
Geocities pages aren't handled any differently from any other pages in PageRank calculation.
So, assuming dwilson's is not a page too new to have had it's actual PageRank calculated yet, his indicated PR4 is probably accurate.
Anyway, since alt text was added to the little green circles I no longer think of them as hidden links.
(Why DOES the Wall Street Journal have such a low PR? I think that it's one of the world's most important newspapers. The New York Times and the Washington Post home pages both have PR 9.)
Why DOES the Wall Street Journal have such a low PR? I think that it's one of the world's most important newspapers. The New York Times and the Washington Post home pages both have PR 9.)
"Importance" for PageRank purposes is nothing but a measure of links. It's isn't a subjective "this is a very important newspaper" decision being made by Google -- it's a measurement of a "this is important enough to link to" decision made by others.
The page I'm redirected to when I go to wsj.com has a PageRank of 7 and 2060 backlinks. Newyorktimes.com shows 40,100 backlinks, washingtonpost.com shows 29,400. And google.com: 230,000.
The relative PageRank of them each seems pretty reasonable.
As for the Journal, if they cared about maximizing their PageRank, they could manage it better! That some links go to wsj.com directly and others go to the targets of the redirects isn't helping. :)
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By the way, Small Website Guy, welcome to WebmasterWorld!
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But, many have correctly pointed out that the WSJ page I'm viewing is a redirected page, presumably based upon a cookie stored on my computer.
When you search for "newspaper" on Google, USA Today comes up at the very top. The next newspaper down is Haaretz--not such a bad paper, but probably not what most people are wanting to read.
It's not that I don't like their coverage. When I did have a subscription, I considered it one of the best papers that I got.
The problem is, that they do not *give* you the information. I am not going to pay them for a $79 just to read one article, and I would not expect anyone else that I send to them with a link to do the same.
They may be one of the best papers, but google is an index of the *free* web.
The purpose of Google is to lead people doing searches to the most important pages, so if the Wall Street Journal is one of the world's most important papers, and it only has PR6, then Google's algorithm isn't working the way it's supposed to.
Well, I'd first say that the "purpose of Google" is to lead people to the most relevant pages in response to their query, not to the most "important" pages, and that in a way this discussion is indicative of a prevailing over-focus on PageRank. But anyway...
If the WSJ publishes an article on a topic that every other major paper also writes about, there's no valid reason for their version to be placed more prominently than that of, say, the Toledo Blade -- except that, because more people have chosen to link to the Journal than to the Blade, Google assumes that people have by consensus decided it is a more authoritative source.
I suppose you could call that "more important source" instead, but the point is that a judgement has to be made as to which of all of the papers go to the top of the list. So by what measurement is the Journal "one of the world's most important papers"? That could be measured in a number of different ways, and Google has chosen one way -- deciding that if fewer sites link to the Journal than to the Times, it's "less important".
