Forum Moderators: open
[webmasterworld.com...]
GoogleGuy, why don't you clarify once and for all the possible differences between a "PR0", and a "greyed out PR"?
Thanks GoogleGuy, that'll set a lot of minds at ease.
Now if Google wanted to be creative....they could update their page rank bar with a '-' sign. (Such as 'page rank -3'...maybe make it red?
Then you KNOW you stepped over the 'Googline' :)
why does the later pages of this thread carry a pr0?
Where a thread splits off to a new page is user dependent -- the choice is in:
Control Panel > Edit System Prefs > "Messages per thread?" option.
"A lot of different things" isn't saying that a penalty can't be one of the things. We've all seen that it can.
soapystar, if those targets "got" a PR0 after having higher PR, then obviously they had been crawled by Google. So my best guess would be that a penalty for them isn't impossible.
What you do about your links to them depends on the particular situation with your site, what your relationship is with the other sites, and how much of a risk it would represent. Plus, how much risk you're willing to take by linking to them in case they have been penalized.
>?why is it that uncrawled pages on my site..(like pages i have just uploaded),.. get a ranking if they are uncrawled?....
Toolbar guesswork. You can upload brand new pages to a brand new account at some free webpage providers and instantaneously see something, which is impossible to be because that page never existed before that very minute.
They'll show some phantom page rank, but won't have ranking, which is something else. Sometimes the term rank is used interchangeably, but one is page rank, the other relates to "scoring" relative to position.
There goes everyone's theory that a PR0 is some kind of penalty!
Not mine! As I've said before - there are loads of reasons for PR0 and only a select few idiots (like myself) have the real penalty deal!
You could have the 0 Rank because...
(a) It's a New site so Google hasn't indexed it all yet with this update
(b) It doesn't have many links to/from it
(c) It can be a long search term or weird URL that's long... Very long.
(d) Google doesn't crawl *everything* - there is a limit....
(e) Duplicate content
I don't *know* but would there ever be a justification? To invent a fictional scenario where that could have possible application, assume someone puts out a product and sets up an affiliate program. Those affiliates will promote the product on the internet through posting links to web sites and email lists, some of which won't allow links that are identifiable with affiliate code.
So instead, as a better alternative that will most likely slip by unless subject to some spam-savvy scrutinization, each affiliate is given a special "landing page" on the main product site with a unique name to be able to identify the source of the customer. That would not necesarily be identifiable by someone who's not aware of that practice being done.
Then, assume that each affiliate also promotes this product on their own web site, with a link to their own landing page at the main site. The webmaster at that site manages to get a PR6 or PR7 for the index page or some special interior page or pages of the main site, and puts on links to the affiiliate pages very selectively, to give those pages the most Page Rank possible.
In turn, those pages have links, hidden or otherwise, to the corresponding affiliate's own web site. Boosting their Page Rank in this way helps them get higher rankings for their sites, increasing exposure and traffic, and therefore, sales of the product.
Those pages, however, except for the link to the affiliate's web site, are all identical - duplicate content. Thinking about the fact that a link is supposed to be a vote for the value of a page, do all those pages with exact duplicate content deserve a vote?
Would a Google PR0 penalty for those pages be justified or unjustified?
GoogleGuy, why don't you clarify once and for all the possible differences between a "PR0", and a "greyed out PR"?
msr986,
you are absolutely right and it does not match Google's normal carefulness and perfection:
Google's own press strongly emphasises the importance and value of (a high)Pagerank:
[google.com...]
The heart of our software is PageRank(TM)..
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank..
and
[google.com...]
Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results..
And on the mouse-over on the Google toolbar:
Pagerank is Google's measure of the importance of this page
The PR0 example soapystar mentions at the beginning of this thread could mean that people misinterpret a page when showing the blank zero toolbar value.
Googleguy answers:
PR0 can mean a lot of different things, including that the page hasn't been crawled by Google
why not show a grey toolbar in this incidence?
Because Google's mouse-over on a grey toolbar is more clear:
Current page is not ranked by Google
Added: Google could modify and clarify a grey toolbar mouseover to:
"Current page is not indexed and therefore not ranked by Google"
Also Google should try to leave out the "guessed" Pagerank for unindexed sub-pages of indexed sites. As again this can be misleading to the searcher.
As far as I have seen pages (such as salon.com) have a greyed-out toolbar because they have a no-index robot text.
I have a "no-index" robottext sub-page on my site with confidential info (yes I need to password it) but it still shows pagerank, which scares me and gives the wrong idea to me and to visitors. In a way its inconsistent of Google.
[edited by: vitaplease at 11:35 am (utc) on July 6, 2002]
Whew...it skipped atleast two beats there.
Although the new software generated pages look similar from a users point of view, everything underneath the page has changed radically. Many of the new features and options are available only to logged in members. Edit, Post, Reply, E-a-friend, Flag a post, and a couple others are now required to be logged in.
The effect is that on any given page now, the number of potential links for a non-logged in user has gone from 5 per post, to the one profile link. Some threads used to have well over a hundred potential links laying on the page. Those same threads now only have 1 per message. The old programs that were used for things like editing a post, replying, or creating a post have all changed.
It had to be done to reduce complexity of the page for humans and bots alike. The rogue bots running around were having a severe impact on the system. Notice how much faster the new software is? Most of that is due to getting rid of all those old links.
On the down side, it means mass 404's for crawlers that are revisiting those old urls with form strings.
Only Google could say how that all works out from the crawlers end of things. I do think you'll see some of that as a side effect in the toolbar on the pr scale.
After the next update, /forum3/3066-2-15.htm (along with pages, 2, 3 etc.) is likely to have some proper PageRank; giving approximately 1 notch less on the Toolbar PR scale than /forum3/3066.htm.
Later, as more threads are started and when the 3066.htm page gets further away from the /forum3/ home page, the 3066* pages will end up with PR0 again. No penalty, just not enough PageRank.
If Brett decided to change the WebmasterWorld home page to a single link, starting a chain of pages where each page links only to the next, then it would take over 200 links before the chain reached PR0. If each page in the chain had one extra link, then the PageRank would last about 30 links. With quite a few links on each page, the PageRank doesn't last for as many links. The complex interlinking within most sites and deep links from external sites make PageRank flow hard to measure in most real life cases.
GoogleGuy:
> I can personally vouch that WebmasterWorld has not gotten a penalty.
I wonder how much some people would pay for a comment like that? :)
Marcia, duplicate content due to an affiliate link was exactly why a member here got a directory PR0 recently (URL mis-match - not a penalty). As far as Google search goes, you might expect the best linked URL to be listed, and its duplicates ignored. You might hope that the listed URL gets credited with the links to both URLs. In December, neither of these things happened and there were a lot of 'glitch' PR0s.
