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Am I wrong?
On my Internet Explorer, running on Windows 2000, you should be able to hover the mouse pointer above the green bar, and a message should pop up saying something like "PR is a measure of something or other (#/10)" and that "#" at the end is your PR. My site says "(6/10)". All 6s are good. All 5 are good. There are posts somewhere that gauge just how good.
I know when you go to google directory you can see something resembling PR for your pages that are in the google ODP based directory. There I can see for instance that our sites are in a certain rank relative to other sites with the same "whole number" PR. I wonder if this is what people are using for that claim.
I read someehere here several times that the directory green bars are not "real" PR though.
I just found that thread doing a site search...I remember during the time of that thread there were similar ones lingering around, so you might want to hunt around site search for similar dates if you find that thread any use.
Let me put it in a different way - with a practical real world example.
Say someone told you that their page has a "high" PR7 in an email trying to get a reciprocal link. (That happened a month or so back too). Is there any basis for that claim - and that it can be proved to the satisfaction of WMW guys here? eg. i may want to check his claim, but so far can only confirm its a 7, not a "high" 7.
I would also think it might be an attempt to manipulate me.
Well ok I admit it there is more i can do to get higher ratings. Just wait fall is my season.
Don't ask i don't know its part of my stats program. Soon i hope.
Re-reading it, I guess the message was just that a 6 is "strong" and a 4 is "weak," but at first glance I took it as implying that the 6 had been pushing 7, and the 4 was just barely over 3.
Site-a index page 5, interior pages 5, including those in /directories/. Knowing who's linking to it, it's a high 5, and could easily to go 6.
Sites in this web community link a lot and some have links from some very high PR, high profile sites, so it's possible to move on up nicely.
Site-b index page 5, interior pages generally 5, now 4. Couple of links lost, it stays 5 but the interior pages fall to 4, a couple added and it stays at 5 and interior pages go to 5, and the PR of the pages an interior page link to goes up a notch, as do their interior pages. It's considerably lower than site-a but not at the bottom end.
Site-c index 5, interior 4. Few links.
Site-d index 4, interior 4. It's linked to from an interior page of site-n, and since this is a decent 4, I know that that interior page of site-b is now a high 4, since it can go to 5 with only a couple of links added for the index page.
Site-e index 4, interior 4. It has a lot of decent links, most likely mid-range.
The web community of sites c, d and e does a lot of linking but it's not high-profile, high PR and a 5 is maximum expectation except in a rare case. I'm watching 2 that got to PR6, but they're treading on thin ice with cross-linking and can be beat out for rankings by a 4 anyway.
Site-f index 4, interior 3. Very low 4, borderline.
A non profit in a community that is never promoted and seems to have low PR across the board.
Site-g index 3, interior 3 and a page linked to from that interior page also 3. An old, long-forgotten site with only one link, from that interior page of site-b, which so easily moves to 5 from 4. So this is a high PR3, which can be figured by back-tracking from the one page linking to it.
Site-b now has a link from site-a (5, almost 6) which will reflect next update, so it'll be interesting to watch for a domino effect and see how the second-generation sites/pages linked to from site-b do. Seeing which ones stay the same or go up a notch will tell how high or low they are at this point, unless other links factor into it, which won't happen for a couple of them.
So as unscientific as it is, it's a combination of checking interior pages, back-links and to a degree the sites linked to from interior pages as well as from the index page of sites.
This also comes in handy when trying to figure out whether PR3 sites have it simply because of not having done links or by being new, or whether they're just recovered from penalties, which could re-occur at any time.
chiyo, with the hypothetical PR7 site, I'd check the PR of the sites they link to and the ones linking to them, both backward and outbound links, and particularly if it were an unsolicited offer, I'd make doubly sure they didn't use excessive cross-linking to get that 7.
I'm looking at some sites that are PR6 and top ten for the same keywords and it's done with some very clever cross-linking, as well as redirecting one of them from third-level domains set up for just this purpose. It's being done across several loosely related keyword sets, all with cross-linking from different third-level domains of the same site, and among the same group. It takes a lot of back-tracking to trace it. I wouldn't do any linking with that group unless it were a strong enough site to withstand it if those take a hit, which is only a matter of time.
Unless you expect that one link to provide the majority of your PR you don't need an accurate measure. It can take a lot of linkage to go from PRn to PRn+1, but the affect on ranking is moderate.
Chris_R's Handy Dandy Google Page Rank Figurin' Guide (it's easy to find) shows how the Toobar and directory PR's relate.
Measuring PageRank is useful if you care about the math's. For example, each link looses only 1/30 of a notch on the Toolbar PR scale due to the 'd' factor. You can't easily find that just from looking at typical Web sites.
A site that floats between the two numbers from update to update. One update it's 6, the next it's 7. I'd call that a high 6.
Also, as others mentioned, if you find yourself continually behind a site in the rankings that floats up one notch, then it's a safe bet, you are still pretty high on that level.
