Question about PR and directories

[MarkJH]

Hi, new member but long time search engine battler! :)

I have a question about increasing PageRank.

All of the artist pages at my site are grouped into sub-folders in this format: www.example.com/bands/nnn/nn/bandpage.html. These pages usually have a PR of 4 whilst my homepage has a PR of 6.

If I moved the pages up one or two folders, would the PR increase? For instance, if they used the format www.example.com/nnn/nn/bandpage.html (without the /bands folder) would the PR automatically rise to 5?

[edited by: ciml at 5:23 pm (utc) on July 9, 2002]
[edit reason] URL Generalised [/edit]

[ciml]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Mark.
(Make sure to check out paynt's welcome post [webmasterworld.com])

Putting the pages at a different URL won't help (assuming no ? characters which are the subject of debate).

PageRank follows links, so in order to increase their PageRank you need either to link to some of your favourite pages from your home page or get more links into the site.

[MarkJH]

I always thought that the deeper you go with directories, the lower the PageRank. This is not true then?

[dcheney]

Mark,
I used to have a site hosted on a free web host. The "index.html" file for that site was about 6 directories down - and it did ok in Google.

[ciml]

Mark, it looks that way because the deeper URLs are often more links from the home page, which normally collects the PageRank from outside.

It also looks that way because the Toolbar guesses the root PR minus one for each '/' when URLs are not indexed and have no PageRank.

[stevenha]

In June, checked a sample of google search results, searching for combinations of non-optimized obscure words, selecting pages that were located 1 directory below root.

The average PageRank of those pages was about 2.0 PR units below their average homepage's PR.

Presumably average websites with average linking structures and average directory structures, tend to distribute their internal PageRank in such a way, I guess, that these results occur.

On the surface then, when Google assigns a temporary "estimated" PR for newly posted pages, the estimate is 1 PR unit below the homepage, which is a somewhat generous estimate.

As I understand it, you are in complete control of how your site's PageRank is distributed to your internal pages, (with the exception of the temporary period when Google is estimating a new page's PR).

If you make your internal links hierarchy different from average, it should be possible to reasonably maintain PR transfer to a page thats several directory levels deep, if you purposely focus it that way.

But doing so would probably result in longer than desirable URLs, and peculiar navigation.