Question on inbound links affecting PR

[krayziez]

Everyone knows that inbound links from a site that has a higher PR is important and may increase your own PR. The question is, does google take the exact page's PR or does it take its domain name's PR? Example, if a user signed up for a free webserver and had a site like www.free.com/~username/home.htm (say this page alone has no exposure or no one has done any SEO on it whatsoever) and say for instance the domain name of "free.com" has a PR of 9, would inbound linking to your site from www.free.com/~krayziez/home.htm be calculated as having an inbound link from a site that's PR9 or would google know that this user is under another server and discounts the inbound link as PR9.

I had this idea when I checked out alexa.com which was powered by google. Funny thing when I went into some site clicking on "See all sites that link to..." where they sort by number of visits, highest number of visits being on the top. For instance free.com or whatever was on the top of the 1000's of links but when I clicked on it, it didn't go to free.com, it went to free.com/~blahblah/index.htm or whoever's username it was.

Question is, is google's algo the same as how alexa sorts and interprets inbound links? Does google work the same way where free.com/~blahblah/index.htm is part of free.com where free.com has a PR9 or does google looks to see the PR of that exact "free.com/~blahblah/index.htm" which might be PR1 or lower?

I've done some searches on google on sites that have a pretty low PR but rank #1 on a VERY competitive search term. I'm suspecting that it has alot to do with inbound links that reside on very exposed domain names with high PRs.

On another note, someone can just sign a guessbook on say guessbook.com/~username/home.htm where the domain name of 'guessbook.com' is very exposed as well. Same concept.

Let me get anyone's take on this. I'm still a newbie and learning as I go. I also wanted to ask: google counts any inbound links regardless if that site's page is not listed on google correct?

Thanks for all the help. You guys rock!

[MHes]

"exact page's PR" - Page rank works on a page basis. Google generally thinks in terms of pages not domains. IMHO it only thinks in terms of domains when evaluating internal navigation links.

Only sites in Google will qualify for giving pr. If google does not know about the site then it cannot give pr.

[krayziez]

OK. But aside from PR, will it make a site's position better in the SERP? PR is only 1 of several ways google calculates the position of the site. Again, I've seen sites with lower PR in higher positions of the SERP. So my real question was, on the original post, will it make my site have better position regardless of the affects of PR? The #1 site for a very competitve search term I'm researching on has only PR6 but has about 500 inbound links. Likewise, a site on position #10 has PR7 but has less inbound links.

[buckworks]

The number of links it takes to reach a certain PR will depend on the quality of those links ... the PR of the page they're on, combined with how many other links are on the page, and likely other variables we haven't figured out yet.

Even a low-PR link can boost your rank in the SERPs if it is worded to reflect and reinforce the word / phrase you're targeting with your on-page optimization.

[decaff]

krayziez,

The best way for me to explain this to you is the following:
When google goes deep crawling (216.239....) so that this bot can find new pages via link relationships...it crawls from one url to another url...if that url it finds from a high value PR site happens to be something like free.com/~blahblah.html then it qualifies that page based on the inbound link text and the relevance to that particular page....then that particular page is assigned a PR value based on this and other relationships found. (but it takes several deep crawl cycles...historically about 35 days....for the PR to solidify)
As all of these inbound links will change in their value over time (some up some down) then the overall PR value for free.com/~blahblah.html will also be affected as google continues to verify and validate link relationships...

Now, once a page has attained some PR (generally PR4 or better) this page begins the journey of being included when one does the link:http:// check via googles search bar. There may be hundreds of PR3 or less pages linking in but you won't see these AND these PR3 or less sites may have great, highly relevant inbound anchor text descriptions...thus the fact that some sites with higher PR don't do so well as those that have understood this necessary concept of valuation of inbounds..
So once you have this type of situation the game switches over to freshbot for pure SEO work...once freshbot finds your site and begins to visit regularly you have to pay close attention to the SERPs because the battle begins for those top positions (Used to be the AltaVista game back in 96/97..seems like eons ago)....once you have established your PR (PR5 or better) then you continue focusing on inbound links because this would be a natural part of a web site's growth over time anyways (without all the SEO meddling)...and you can bet that Google has elegantly programmed and integrated the organic nature of the web into their algorithm...

Just some thoughts on my end...hope they help with your process..

[decaff]

krayziez,

Quick followup...stay away from guestbooks...they are worthless and can get you banned..they have been completely exploited as a way to increase inbound link PR value and Google ignores them...let's review...stay away from guestbooks...(as a method to gain PR)

[paulk]

Not true, I have seen sites with over 800+ guestbook signatures take #1 spots for competitive keywords and it seems to work, although I'm sure eventually google is going to figure out a way to shut down the exploitation, it just doens't seem like it happened yet.

[rfgdxm1]

One of Google Adword customer is a firm that openly advertises they spam guestbooks. Thus, if Google bans for guestbook signatures, they literally are profiting of getting people banned from Google. ;) Looks like Google is getting better at spotting and ignoring guestbook links.