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So here goes, this may take some time to write so if anyone answers I maybe on the floor having a snooze so you better excuse me.
Whats is a PR
For anyone out there who is new to webmasterworld or infact the internet you will here a lot of people on these forums and other forums / newsites / newsgroups etc etc talking about its pro's, con's and general uses. Most people generally wimp and gripe about the value they have and why it should be higher. In reality if you actually sit down and look at the PR bar for long enough it will vanish into a blur and this is where and how most people should see it.
The PR value is basically an "estimate" of the value and weight of the pages held within a website. This is worked out by Google using a set of "complex algorithums" which are derived from a sites keyword density, links, strcuture and much much more. Unfortunatly in reality it is not very hard to get a site good rankings for just about any keyword or phrases despite popular belief. Of course you can cloak, spam and cheat your way to the top but we dont want to do that here. Now assuming I built a website and got it number 1 in 3 months for say vehicle finance what would my PR value be? Assuming the site has only been up 3 months at a guess I would put it between the PR 3-5 level.
This is where most people start to get worried and confused.
My site is a white bar after 3 months, whats wrong?
My site is only PR 2 and I have 70 pages indexed
These are just a couple of summed up comments that I have seen over the last few weeks from random posters on WebmasterWorld. What in reality you should be asking yourself is.
Thats just a small list and im sure I could go on forever and list many more things...
One thing you have to remember about a PR is that it is also not 100% accurate. This can be for a variety of reasons like the fact Google didnt pick up 100 links I added last month or the fact it crawled when you where uploading a whole new site and therefore half the site is missing. Personally I may take a look at the PR value of the site but it only weighs about 10% on any decision I would make.
The general concensus for what a PR is? If I had to sum it up in one sentence it would read.
Pagerank is a mathematical figure determined from multiple factors is give an "approximate" figure for the value and weight that a site holds in Google's index
Analyse that sentence as you see fit but take a close look at the last section of the sentence.
in Google's index
Says it all really...
In my years of using the internet I have seen many ways of determining how good a site is. For example I have seen some PR 7 sites that are about as pleasing to the eye as Margaret Thatcher. What good is your PR value if your site looks like a big steamer...!
Well that is not an easy question to answer. If you are a technical webmaster or someone who uses the internet on a regular basis then you may come to a site and if it functions badly or looks awful then almost straight away you leave. We all may so we dont but its true, I am an absolute pain for it and if there is a problem with a site usually I dont even bother to tell the webmaster. And is is where my next point comes from.
If the site looks so bad where has the PR come from?
The answer to that question is basically,
From that list you can see mainly the things which are used by webmaster to optimize sites. We all know that "content is king" and that we "must submit to dmoz" and then someone comes out with "but how does this affect our PR?".
My instant response? Who cares... My main website at present has a grand total of 3 inbound links, is not in dmoz, has a PR of 4 and sits happily in the the 5 for about 80% of my keywords. In retrospect this is exactly the same place I was at 4 months ago when my site had a PR of GREY BAR. That is about all I need to say on the matter. As long as your site is optimized, you are getting traffic and you are happy does it matter. I would go as far as to say that a good PR value is like an Armani Suit. The guy in it maybe butt ugly but he would still pull all the women. We are a lot more like sheep than we think we are.
My next point of note is about what we could do to improve the PR value and actually make it useable...
My suggestion would be to separate the bits out so we have a bit more of a dashboard. For example there should be;
This would enable us to see and have a clearer understanding of what the site is like.
For example a post earlier this morning was related to a site that has a PR of 7 and the reason for it is that it has a ton of inbound links because the site / owners / products are below standard. Obviously we could check this manually by going in and doing link:www.widgets.com etc etc but Joe Surfer is not
If the toolbar was separated like this then it could possibly read.
Why would it be like this and how would we look at it.
Well on the basis it has a link pop / inbound link value of 7 but a visitor pop of 2 then this could tell us that there must be something wrong with the site that would prevent people from visiting.
Im not going to go deeper into that conversation as it would benefit nobody.
SUMMARY
There isnt one really, its all a matter of opinion. Its a pre calcualted algarithmic number generatic on average once a month and therefore is never as up to date as we need it so we do you put so much trust in it?
Questions on a postcard please.
Over the past year or so, I've heard several Google employees talk about reducing the significance of internal linking. I'll bet anyone here a beer at the next PubCon that when the "new and improved" version of Google is released, internal links will become almost a non-factor.
Are you suggesting that, on a site of 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 pages, only those pages that receive inbound links from external sites will have PageRank?
Or that the algorithm will disregard anchor text in internal links?
Either scenario would cause problems, IMHO:
In the first case, failure to transfer PageRank from page A to page B would block the natural flow of PageRank through the site and on to external sites. Let's say that I have a site about China that has a page about Shanghai, and the Shanghai page has a link to scintillating-shanghai.org. If PR doesn't transfer from my China home page to my Shanghai page, how will scintillating-shanghai.org receive PR from my outbound link?
In the second case, disregarding anchor text in my internal links would make it harder for Google to figure out what's on my pages--e.g., that my Shanghai page is about Shanghai.
It's possible that Google could limit the amount of PageRank that's transferred by navigation links, so that--for example--a link to china-widgets.htm from each of my 10,000 mythical China pages wouldn't push china-widgets.htm to the top of the SERPs for "china widgets." But that wouldn't be the same as making internal links "almost a non-factor."
4/5 PR 7/8 links are more valuable, whatever the text link says. So long as the PR is put to good use!
Internal links have very little to do with PR whatsoever, except maybe to divert EXISTING PR, to pages of your choice, as someone has already pointed out.
You cannot create PR, otherwise everyone would be wildly creating thousands of pages, maybe 6/7 words on each page, makes no difference if 2000 words per page.
If it were possible to create PR, the PR ideal would not work...ok ok, so some say it isn't now, but you cannot achieve a PR figure without incoming links.
I did think that was common knowledge?
Everyone in the industry is trying to increase their PR. Except for me, I could care less about PR but I do care about link popularity (tricky, eh?).
You can use PR for marketing your site for ads, links, etc. thus pulling more income. That is probably the answer to why people are obsessed.
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I couldn't agree with you more Netizen
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Netizen
I see you have a PR6, nice one! ;-...The main one
Anchor text has nothing to do with PR whatsoever
I don't think anyone is disputing that.
Internal links have very little to do with PR whatsoever, except maybe to divert EXISTING PR, to pages of your choice, as someone has already pointed out.
Yes, but on a big site, large numbers of internal links to certain pages can increase the PageRank of those targeted pages. If Google stopped transferring PageRank between internal pages (or if such transfers were capped in some way), it would no longer be possible for a large site to build up the PR of its key pages through carefully planned navigation links.
I think in point #3 WebGuerrilla meant about the importance of internal anchor text and it's decrease in ranking criteria for the future.
mysite.com/index.php
about-us.mysite.com
services.mysite.com
....
...
..
contact-info.mysite.com
If a site's pages in total are receiving PR x from its external inbound links, can the internal linking of the site give it PR (x+y); could the internal linking of a site raise the amount of PR "capital" available to pass on to a new site?
We should stop fixating on PageRank and just try to get our sites to appear high in the SERPS - ranking is based on 100's of factors of which PageRank is one.
Netizen thank you for clarifying the entire point I was trying to make in one sentence.
My new slogan "STOP FIXATING ON PAGERANK". It will be on my website in 5 minutes :)
Notice also how Netizens site is PR6 with a whole 5 links. Confused..! I am but hey thats why I dont trust PR whatsoever and will never use it as a tool to stop me getting links, buying a product etc etc.
The point of the entire discussion (which it has turned out to be and so I thank everyone who has taken part) was that PR is irrelevant to anything we do and to look at it as gospel is pointless.
I see new people joining the forums everyday and getting totally the wrong end of the stick straight away and going,
I have a PR of 2 what am I going to do?!?
In reality that person maybe in the phychodelic wig field and so they have no competition and they also appear on top of the SERPS and that is what truly matters. Top place ranking or PR10? I'd take the top placed rankings with PR0 anyday.
The google PR on the toolbar is the scurge or the webmaster world and should be kicked into touch ASAP.
Anyone else seeing this?
However, Google seems to have changed the PR calculation algorithm. One way to do this is to modify the calculation in the following way: reduce or even remove the (1-d) contribution in the PR formula for most of the pages (especially internal pages). (PR is still distributed over the pages with the damping factor d.) Add artifical PR sources to get a reasonable model.
In the 'random surfer view' this would correspond to be teleported (with probability 1-d) to a few pages (the 'PR sources') instead to a randomly chosen page.
(Apologies for being the dumber one!)
As for the (1-d) part of the PageRank algorithm - that is the seed for everything else.
But: real PR, as what Google calculates for a page, is definitely a huge factor in ranking. Until now PR and anchortext were the two ingredients you could rank pages with whereever you wanted. I don't expect that to drastically change, though that is open to speculation.
europeforvisitors: If a site's pages in total are receiving PR x from its external inbound links, can the internal linking of the site give it PR (x+y); could the internal linking of a site raise the amount of PR "capital" available to pass on to a new site?
I don't see how, but my eyes tend to glaze over when I look at formulas, so I'm not the person to ask. :-)
Until now PR and anchortext were the two ingredients you could rank pages with whereever you wanted.
Couldn't agree more :)
I don't expect that to drastically change though that is open to speculation
My logic agrees with this statement but as you said it's open to speculation ;)
However, it seems to me that getting a few high quality links from PR5 and above sites will create a sufficiently good PR. Getting hundreds of links from PR2-PR3 sites or links from PR4-PR5 sites with hundreds of outgoing links just appears to add marginally to it.
..is that a complicated way of saying they're trying to decrease internal link importance while also using localised PR to speed up the calculation?
It's a complicated way of showing a way to prevent producing PR (by creating a large number of internal pages). PR would be just distributed over the (internal) pages.
The time for the PR calculation wouldn't be affected very much by these changes.
However, it seems to me that getting a few high quality links from PR5 and above sites will create a sufficiently good PR.
Agreed, and "sufficiently" is defined depending on how competitive your industry is, and your competitors PR.
Getting hundreds of links from PR2-PR3 sites or links from PR4-PR5 sites with hundreds of outgoing links just appears to add marginally to it.
Agreed - in terms of PR. As a side note (and more important IMO) is that, for our site, we actually get more *traffic* from our bunch of links from PR2-PR4 pages than we do from google.
TJ
Agree. For competitive keywords every bit counts and more the links, better. I am dealing with non-competitive academic searches with max #results around 100,000 and a low PR6 (a number I am shooting for) should be good enough.
Regarding traffic I agree. I have put my links into a couple of guestbooks, message boards and Yahoo groups and even though those are not going to contribute to my PR, traffic is nice and more importantly from people who are interested in my subject areas.
"Only sites with a certain PR display backlinks"
"Links from +PR sites will increase your site's PR"
etc.
From May 2002 - Sep 2002 I had a site with no incoming links at all which was consistently a 5.
I set up a site in Jan this year for the specific purpose of testing this and it is a 2 (with no backlinks at all)
A new, grey-barred site was No's 1, 7 and 11 for keywords after 48hrs. Then it became a 2 and these positions became 178, n/a, n/a.
I have a client's site where the index page went to PR0, yet still displays 5 backlinks. The next page is a PR4, and displays only one backlink - to its own PR0-rated home page!
I have also sites that have backlinks to PR4s and 5s, yet have no PR.
Another site dropped suddenly from a PR3 to a PR0, and from that point on its traffic has been increasing by around 10% (of the original value) per day.
So this is why I don't argue about PR anymore. It has about as much logic behind it as Alice in Wonderland. The sooner people stop taking notice of it the better - it means absolutely *nothing*.
Ncsuk
The number of links is not important, the quality of the links are, of course we would all like many "high quality links"
Why you are confused I don't know, you have completely missed the point.
The site you mention has several PR5 links and a PR7 link, so why would that confuse you?
I'm still waiting to see a site with a PR value and no back links BTW -;
