Odd behavior with the latest Google crawl

BIG changes with our backlinks from internal to external

[jeff123a]

Thanks again for the help all of you provide.

My site is in the real estate industry. On the previous crawl, our site was #8 for our most important key words with 70 backlinks, many of which were from other pages on our site. PR 5

On the most recent crawl, our site moved to #4 for the same keywords with 76 backlinks, none of which are backlinks from pages on our site. PR now varies from 4 to 5 whenever I go to the homepage and look on the Google toolbar.

However, the #1 site for these keywords has hundreds of backlinks from other pages on its site (the site is owned by a newspaper) and the #2 site has fewer backlinks than mine with a consistent PR of 4. This #2 site does not change the text on its homepage and its backlinks do not change either. It has been in the top 10 on Google for a couple of years and was one of the first real estate sites in our area in DMOZ. Perhaps the DMOZ editor is associated with this site?

'tis is a puzzlement. Thanks.

[glengara]

Could be link text, try an allinanchor search using the KWs.

[takagi]

Hello jeff123a. You wrote the PageRank on your homepage was PR5 and is now it shows sometimes PR4 and sometimes PR5. That would suggest that the PR of your homepage is now a low PR5 or a high PR4. With Google finding more pages every month, the PR of existing pages is likely to get lower unless you get more links. The PR shown on the toolbar is a whole number, so a PR5 can be 5.99 or 5.01 and there is no way to find out the real value (although with the green bar in the Google Directory you might see the difference between a high and a low PR5). So a small drop of PR is not always visible. You can only see backlinks if both the page with the link and the page being linked, have a high PR4 or higher. So pages with low PR4 or below will not show up. Usually the homepage has the highest PR of the site. I don't know your site, but I would suspect the other pages of your site to be a low PR4 or below if your homepage has a high PR4/low PR5. That would explain why they are not shown anymore as backlinks. But don't worry; links that are not visible still count as links. What is more important is the ranking in the SERP. And your site is now doing better.

> Perhaps the DMOZ editor is associated with this site?
A DMOZ editor can only add/removes links to pages and edit the description. If both your site and his site have 1 link in DMOZ from the same category then you both have the same incoming PR form DMOZ (and clones like Google Directory). It doesn't matter if he is associated with the sit if also the link text and description is similar (with respect to keyword etc).

[HitProf]

jeff123a,

Did you look to the the type of links? There may be a difference between linking from "all pages to all pages" and "selective linking to related pages".