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I thought about a penalty, but then we began looking deeper into this. Our secondary site has maintained a Page Rank of 5 for about 8 months now - no changes at all in backwards links, and this too dropped a point to a 4.
We also see some competetors that have held 6's for a while, now have 5's. Yet I still come across the site that will have a Page Rank of 6 with only 60-70 inbound links - not even from "great" ranking sites!
Our position is about the same - but does anyone else notice that page rank is getting stricter? Has anyone else seen a decrease for no apparent reason?
As always - wishing you all the best!
One of the sites is one I haven't worked on much in months, but it does have content that tends to get unsolicited .edu & .org links so I guess that's where the increase came from.
I've had unsolicited links from public libraries, university libraries, and places like lii.org even though my editorial site is "commercial" in terms of having affiliate or advertising links. I suspect it's because I don't let the advertising overwhelm the editorial content. As a user, I dislike content sites that have an excessive advertising-to-editorial ratio, and I imagine that librarians and academic types are even more turned off by a cornucopia of banners, skyscrapers, buttons, pop-ups, and e-commerce links.
In today's weak ad market, the losses from exercising self-restraint in a site's ad-to-editorial ratio might be outweighed by the gain in inbound links and PageRank--and that, in turn, would boost the performance of the more productive ads and affiliate links.
I haven't seen any evidence that Google does theming across different domains linking, and am somewhat dubious about how much Google may theme within a domain. The very idea of trying to theme across domains sounds computationally complex and ppossibly impractical. My assumption is that other than the text used in the anchor link, what is on the rest of the linking page is irrelevant.
I have been adding pages to a directory for 6 months now. The directory was originally based on the ODP and allows you to add urls for sites you control. As I added each page I used to note down the PR value. Returning to categories where I added pages I see that they are now a lower PR than when I added them (some are PR0 - but I don't think they are penalised but genuine less than PR1). Believe me I never would have added a link from a PR0 page to my sites. In the past they were PR2 or 3. There has been no site redesign or significant number of links added. I noticed this effect last month but it seems even more pronounced this month.
So, I think a change in the PR algorithym has taken place. In the directory I refer to there are obviously loads of links on each page at higher levels - e.g. music/bands&artists/E. Each actual band page seems to have lost PR. There are much cleverer people than me who can say whch part of the PR calculation needs to change to cause pages of large numbers of links to pass on less PR than before - but I think that something like that has happened.
This may be a measure to reduce the effect of link farms or other spam methods . It means that the links to your site may have been seriously devalued if they are on pages with lots of links (or lots of links on pages higher in the structure).
(Although something _did_ happen =p)
No. PR is totally an automated contruct. The drop in PR is probably a combination of #1) A LOT more stuff coming on line. All those personal home pages, etc. new now bloat the index. #2) Some have stated Google is now doing a better job indexing dynamically generated pages. This also bloats the index, spreads PR around more, and thus average PR is lower.
HOWEVER, there is some reason to suspect that Google has lowered the importance of PR in the algo. Googleguy even hinted at this with a comment that Google had changed the algo to deal with PR for sale. Thus, a PR7 doesn't get you as much as it used to 4 months ago.
My site with the PR6 links used to have a bunch of affiliate links, but since they weren't converting I took all but 1 of them off and just stopped work on the site for awhile.
So the pages as they stand have almost no advertising right now, which may be why they are getting the nonprofit links. Plus I think taking off the affiliate links stopped some of the page rank link drain.
stopped some of the page rank link drain.
Hi Jane_Doe, this is a bit of a misunderstanding or mis-statement.
A Page does not lose its own PageRank my transferring PageRank to another page.
The implied "drain" is from the amount transferred when more than 1 link exists.
.e.g - if Page is PR6 and linked to 1 page that page would receive the maximum possible PageRank but the Page sending the PR would not depreciate in value.
If the same Page transferred to 2 different links each would receive 50% of the maximum possible PageRank, but again the Page sending would not depreciate in value.
4 links -- 25% and so on.
So the only implied "drain" would be -- as more links are added to the "sending page" each new link would receive less and less and the previous links would "drop" in PageRank value received, but the sending page would still have PR6.
Hi fathom, perhaps you misread what I wrote. I never said a page lost its own PR because of outbound links. What I said was that "I think taking off the affiliate links stopped some of the page rank link drain."
The site in question has navigation bars and many interlinked internal pages. So if I have a PR6 page, Page A, with links to 6 of my other pages and 6 links to affiliate sites, then taking off the affiliate links is going to increase the PR flowing to my own internal pages. Removing 40 outgoing links across the site is decreasing the amount of links draining PR away from my site in total.
The PR value passed on from a page doesn't just evaporate when the affiliate links are removed - it gets redistributed among the pages within my own site through the links in the nav bars and links to related pages, thus increasing their own PR.
All 4 of the PR8's are now 6, except for one slipped only to 7. I retained my PR5, although I was expecting it to go to 6, now I know why.
The PR value passed on from a page doesn't just evaporate when the affiliate links are removed
Yes it does, sort of.
it gets redistributed among the pages within my own site through the links in the nav bars and links to related pages, thus increasing their own PR.
These are two different issues.
Yes -- by removing some external link you can increase PageRank passed to other external links but this has little bearing on PageRank passed internally. If this was the case (as an example) DMOZ would be hurting severely, particularly at the lowest levels of the link hierarchy.
By decreasing the number of internal links from one page will allow more PageRank to be transferred internally to specific pages, but changing the number of external link will not change this.
IMO PageRank passed internally is a mirage, it's not "natural" and therefore it does not matter how many external links you have on any single page, there will be no significant internal effect with 1000 external links as opposed to none.
This is not saying that internally transferred PageRank does not have value. In the example of all your inbound links are to your mainpage and you link out on another page (that has no "natural" PageRank from inbound links), here you are passing on PageRank by Proxy (sort of speak).
We all need to remember that PageRank "is" an external phenomena and not an internal one.
Although you can manipulate it "internally" as to how it propagate through your site, it has no real value "unless you're linking out" somewhere.
[edited by: fathom at 8:26 am (utc) on Nov. 4, 2002]
Good idea. Here is recent thread that lists a few PR10 pages before the update.
[webmasterworld.com...]
I didn't have the enrgy to check to all PR10's to see which dropped but I did notice that DMOZ is now a PR9 (at least when I checked anyway).
Also now a measly PR9
"We all need to remember that PageRank 'is' an external phenomena and not an internal one." - fathom
fathom,
Based on what I observe on the web and from the published PageRank theory, I am under the impression that PageRank is both an internal and external phenomena. My thinking is along the lines of Jane_Doe’s . . . If you remove some external links from page A then the internal links that pageA links to will get more PageRank and if they in turn link back to page A then page A’s PageRank will have increased because the external links were removed.
I am not positive if internal and external PageRank is transferred in an identical manner. However, I don’t see a way for them to be totally separate from each other.
...of all the reduced number of backlinks and drop in PageRank can any other members confirm a greater loss of "internal" backlink pages, as opposed to external links.
I think there is something in the new algo which compares links to others in their specific category and then to related categories further up the directory. If this is true, it makes a lot of sense!
The number of possible links in any given industry are limited (to a degree) and I believe Google are comparing apples to apples here.
It is too easy to check out your competitors links and go after them. Unfortunately, I still can't afford to buy my way into all the paid link pages ... but I really don't care. My site is still producing nicely and on this update, I went from #4 to #3 on my main keyword search ... beating out both sites with the PR 5! Getting there! ;)
Has anyone else seen a decrease for no apparent reason?
You bet! Almost all of our sites has dropped 1 point in page rank after the last update. But there has been no drop in trafic at all.
I have a site (not the one in my profile) that is just sort of a hobby. It's PR is based almost entirely on one DMOZ and one Yahoo link. It dropped one point in PR. I wouldn't bet my life on it, but I would guess many people are experiencing the negative PR effects of DMOZ intermintently burping this past five weeks.
But other sites I work on that are in DMOZ dropped a point or 2 in PR since the new update. But the sites that are not in DMOZ all stayed the same PR.
But the funny thing is my backlinks more than doubled this update on the PR6 site.
Of course, today's 6 may actually be 6.01, and last month's may have been 6.99. I guess there's no way of knowing.
Could it be a neighbourhood thing? (travel sector)
Another site has remained constant eg was pr5 and still is. (web promotion sector)
Perhaps we are all assigning far too much importance to this pr thing, after all, my rankings have improved on the reduced pr site and whereas rankings have dropped for the site that has remained pr stable.
Perhaps Google has a rolling random algo aimed at baffling us all!
We dropped from a 6, which we have had for as long as i have had the toolbar, about 6 months, we now dropped down to 5. Many other sites are dropping aswell, yes we are listed in dmoz, maybe there is a link.
Theory:
If anyone could ever match Overture, it would have to be google (as things stand today) I belive Google have tasted to much pay per click and will try to send less traffic to us (small business entrepeneurs) Results: Statistically more webmasters will sign up for a Adwords account, more money to google... )
I have not noticed any drop in traffic from google yet
Is google heading for a even more commercial "model"?
I belive there may be something here...
Lars
