Algorithms details

[grasso]

I hate to ask. I would like to dismiss Gogol and quit the dehumiliating strive for high PR, but I cannot. So I have a practical question:

When sites link to the start page of my site, let us call it "the reference budget", how is the PR of the article pages on my site computated? When I have 20 article pages, will they get lower PR than when the budget is spend on only 10 pages? When my articles are short (and yet contain all keywords), is PR raised? I know this is a filthy topic but it is real.

Uli

[lazerzubb]

Uh didn't really follow you there, try going through the SEM research topic where PageRank papers have been linked from, and they'll give you a good idea of how PageRank is splitt up.

[djgreg]

In General you could say, the more links there are on a site the less pagerank every linked site will receive.
But don't use the toolbar as an indicator for the pagerank, the toolbar will show same PR on every site. The point is if it is a high or low PR3 for example.

[doc_z]

When my articles are short (and yet contain all keywords), is PR raised?

PR only depends on the link structure. PR doesn't depend on content.

(However, the raking depend on content. PR is just one factor.)

When I have 20 article pages, will they get lower PR than when the budget is spend on only 10 pages?

The total amount of PR of your site (sum over all pages) is the incoming PR plus the contribution from your site (which is proportional to the number of pages). Normally, the 'self produced' PR is small compared to the PR coming from external pages/sites. Therefore, changing the link structure and/or adding (a few) pages change the distribution of PR while the total amount is (nearly) unchanged. Thus increasing the number of article pages will lead to a decrease of PR for a single article page. If you change the number from 10 to 20 you (probably) won't see an effect in the ToolbarPR (since this is just an integer an a logarithmic scale). However, the real PR is approximately halved.

In general you can say that you can decide how PR is spread over your site. For example, you can have a few high PR and numerous lower PR pages or distribute PR nearly equally over your pages. It depends on if you want to optimize for a single page (keyword) or a number of pages (e.g. different products).