Is Google's Page Rank a Fixed Game?

[paladin]

A few days ago I visited the "Google Store". The first thing that caught my eye was the fact that it had a rank of 9 out of 10. Out of curiosity I did a search on Google to see how many sites were linking to this store. Google listed 19 incoming links. How can this create such a high score? I have no idea. Before writing this I double checked the rank and number of links. The rank has now increased to 10 with about 12,000 incoming links. Not to sneeze at 12,000 links, but just to give you an idea according to Google there are 2,890,000 incoming links to their main home page giving it a rank of 10. So how can 12,000 links also give a 10? If it were that easy, there would be quite a few more sites with a 10.

[steveb]

A single link from the Google main page likely would make a new page PR10. Volume of links isn't an issue. You should read up on pagerank.

[hugo_guzman]

1) PR is effected by both the amount AND POTENCY of a web page's backlinks. Not all backlinks are created equally. A link from google's homepage can be more powerful than 25,000 links from other less "potent" sources.

2)Your logic is flawed. 10 is the highest score alotted, and obviously there is a threshold for becoming a ten, but you must also take into consideration that not all PR 10 pages are equal. The google homepage would be considered a strong PR 10 (it could have 1,000,000,000,000 backlinks but it ain't going to get any higher than a PR 10), while the google store (I assume that you are referring to "froogle") would be a weak 10 but a 10 nonetheless. You're comparing the homepage of quite possibly the most potent website in the world with an interior page of that same website. Of course the homepage is more potent, but the fact remains that both have a PR 10. One is just stronger than the other.

That is the main problem associated with gauging a web page using a ten point scale. Fortunately, google calculates pagerank internally using decimals (PR= 5.23043403) but this data is not available to the public.

[paladin]

I am not talking about Froogle. I am talking about GoogleStoreDOTcom.

My point was that at the time there were very few incomming links to the site, 19, and it still had an unusually high PR. From what I remember none of those 19 were from the Google domain.

To me it felt as if the PR was artifically inflated because of the owners of the domain.

[coconutz]

One shouldn't rely on the results of the link: command as Google only displays a sampling of the backlinks.

link:http://www.googlestore.com [search.yahoo.com]

[steveb]

Beating a dead horse now, but again, a single link from a PR10 could make a page a PR10 (or at least PR9). And if you were looking at the backlinks Google displays, those mean nothing.

That domain is linked from blogger and the PR10 Google sitemap and plenty of other places, so it is no surprise it is a PR10.

[rfgdxm1]

>One shouldn't rely on the results of the link: command as Google only displays a sampling of the backlinks.

Exactly. For this purpose the Google link: command is near useless. I strongly suspect Google did this intentionally. How many Average Joe surfers use the link: command? (Hell, from logs I have seen it looks like very few Average Joe surfers even comprehend how to use quotation marks in searches. On a typical day, I use that multiple times when searching.)

[paladin]

One shouldn't rely on the results of the link: command as Google only displays a sampling of the backlinks

I think that my mistake was, that I though that with the exception of new links, all links on pages that have a PR 4 or above showed up in the link command.

It didn't even cross my mind that a link on a PR 10 page, like the one on their site map, would not show up in the results.

Thanks everyone for clearing this up for me.

[coconutz]

>>...with the exception of new links, all links on pages that have a PR 4 or above showed up in the link command.

It seems to be the complete opposite now. ;)