Topic Sensitive Page Rank

Does toolbar PR help at all!?

[shady]

Initially, please let me mention that this posting is based upon speculation and I am not presenting it as fact, rather as the beginnings of a discussion! In which case, please don't be too hard on me :-)

I would like to discuss the existence and effect of TSPR and how it affects us as SEOs.

Firstly, is it in place or a myth?
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Before the last standard PR update, I "obtained" some high PR inward links to some of my sites. These links are from sites which are unrelated any specific area of commerce but are not directories.

My sites already had a fair number of inward links. Since the PR update, the homepage of one "established" site has risen from PR5 to PR7 but has received no noticable increase in visitors.

As a potential comparison, in December of 2002 an unrelated inward link of PR7 increased the same homepage from PR5 to PR6 and visitors to over 3 times the original traffic.

To me, this is evidence that TSPR is in place, however maybe I am impatient and will see better results over the next couple of months.

If it is in place, do unrelated high PR links help at all?
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I believe the answer is probably YES for the following reasons:

1) If you have a suite of higher PR sites, you are more likely to attract webmasters who may be interested in trading links from independant sites (e.g. link to one, receive a link from another).

2) I believe that, although the page which received the unrelated link did not benefit in the serps, any outward links from any of these pages will benefit from the increased PR. I have seen increases of 100% this month to a site receiving a link from the above example, which may be coincidental.

If this is true, why do we benefit from directory links then?
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If the web is being divided into communities, one of these communities will be directories. Links from these sites are perhaps treated as not having a subject, in which case they are not rejected as not being relevant.

Let us discuss? :-)
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Have you an example which proves that TSPR is in place?
If the web is divided into communities, are these at page level or site level?
Am I talking complete rubbish?

Best regards
Shady!

[shady]

I guess the obvious comment would be "well of course things aren't the same as they were 18 months ago" :-)

Anyone any other comments?

[kaled]

It is entirely plausible that Google may attempt to assign topic values to pages and thus a topic-sensitive PR is born being the product of the two values.

How that value might be used is more complex.

When my site was born, I aimed for backlinks on relevant pages as my first priority. My serps improved quickly - sufficiently quickly for me to speculate on the same subject.

If such strategies are technically possible, it would be a poor search engine that did not use them.

Kaled.

[shady]

I think we have all been amazed when adding adsense to a page, how efficiently and accurately google serves up the ads.

The transition from this artificial intelligence, to assigning groups to the WWW is surely therefore a small one (if indeed it was not done before adsense!).

How that value might be used is more complex

If this were something I were designing, I would be allocating very generalised groups (e.g. travel and accomodation) rather than specific areas and probably only be interested in commercial areas, as these are obviously the areas of SEO abuse (for want of a better word!). Using this method I would think would work well, as the most logical reason to direct a customer from your site to anothers is to offer "something the customer would be interested in" AND "something you do not offer".

Off the top of my head (and with what little brainpower I have left after 16 hour days working on 3 sites at a time!) there would appear to be less top level groups than you might think (I await corrections at this point!).