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I have a brand new site with PR0, 2 directories deep and thousands of individual content pages. Now if a few sites with PR4 and PR5 link back to me would that affect just the homepage, or ALL pages? The majority of pages are 2 levels deep. So could I maybe get PR2 across thousands of pages or would the few backlinks simply be DILUTED too much across that many pages?
Thanks in advance for some great feedback ;-)
Please remember that the PR is passed to the pages linked from a page and not by directory structure. So if you link to a page 3 directories deep from the home page, you still pass on the PR.
HTH.
There is no such thing as the PR of a whole site. Even though people here will talk about a site having such and such a PR, it's really a confusing turn of phrase. PR is only about pages - and there's no such thing as the PR of a site.
When a page links to other pages, then its PR is portioned out over the total number of outgoing links, and the target pages each get that bit of a "PR vote." And those pages, in turn, portion out their PR over whatever pages their links point to.
Now the whole PR circulation between pages usually goes round and round in loops, and some of the PR a page sends out can come back to it and it receives a little bit of boost in its own PR. So the PR calculation isn't straightforward arithmetic. The mathematical term is that the calculation is "iterated", or done over and over around all the linking lopps on the web.
On each iteration, the PR values that result change less and less, until eventually a limit is approached. But for day to day thinking, you can just consider that each page has a pile of PR that gets divided up and "voted" over to its target pages.
[edited by: tedster at 5:52 am (utc) on April 20, 2003]
heres a question I had asked a while back and got no answer as of yet.
DO you get penalized linking all your pages in one domain, and how much does it help PR if you do?
for example if you have 100 pages in your domain, and you link to the other 99 on a page, every page, what would happen?
for example if you have 100 pages in your domain, and you link to the other 99 on a page, every page, what would happen?
Normally if you have a PR2 for the homepage, and you get a few links from PR4 pages, your homepage will go to PR3 or even PR4. And some sub pages with PR1 might go to PR2.
If you have a site with 100 pages linked like you described, and the homepage has PR2, then the sub pages will most likely also be PR2. You will need dozens of inbound links from PR4 pages to go to PR3. But once the homepage goes to PR3, the sub pages will almost certain also get a PR3 at the same time.
A high PR is important (but other factors are important too) to get a nice ranking on the SERP [webmasterworld.com]. You lower the PR of your homepage if you spread the PR over all the pages. So lowering the PR on your homepage will result in a lower position on the SERP if the other factors (like title, H1-tags etc) don't change. On the other side, with the right link text on the 99 internal links to your homepage, you could compensate this effect to some extend.
I have a brand new site with PR0, 2 directories deep and thousands of individual content pages. Now if a few sites with PR4 and PR5 link back to me would that affect just the homepage, or ALL pages?
And yes, google indexed thousands of pages on the first visit (therefore creating a site with PR0 across 15,000+ pages), that's why I am so curious on "where" to get the backlinks sent to.
If each of the 100 pages linked to the other 99 pages normally (not hidden links), each page will effectively have 99 incoming links which is a very good thing. If suitable anchor text and file names are used, it can do wonders to the rankings.
The PR of all the pages will be quite good (I guess it will be PR 4 at least).
(I guess it will be PR 4 at least).
The PageRank you can generate on a site yourself is very limited. And if you spread it out over all the pages, it will result in a PR0. No doubt.
If every internal page is either one or two hops from your Home Page, and you have thousands of pages, then you've probably got a lot of links on a page. The main dilution effect will come from the number of links you have on a page -- they divide up the PR vote from an external site. Two hops in, I've seen pages drop to PR2 from a PR6 Home Page.
Getting external links directly to your internal pages is an excellent goal and will help handle that dilution effect.
Getting external links directly to your internal pages is an excellent goal and will help handle that dilution effect.
I would go even farther. Let people link to any place in your site that they want to. Never have a page just go away, if you move it, put in a 301 permanent redirect.
Give outside sources, that are interested in a specific subset of your information, a page that lists internal links to those specific areas. I have a few of these pages that bring me over 1000 visitors a month, and links to internal pages from PR6 pages.
And to answer your original question, I have a site with around 3000 pages, ranging from PR6 for the home page down to PR2 on some of the lowest level pages. A PR5 deep link will easily draw those PR2 pages up to a PR4-5 and will pull up all the nearby pages to PR3-4.
