Confused about how PR is figured

How does Google determine PR?

[allanp73]

Hi,

I just received an annoying spam message, which told me that I can list my online store on their Internet mall. I don't know why but I decided to visit their site. I noticed that they had a PR 6. So I checked their back links and noticed they had only 24, all of which were pages from their site and they had about 90 pages listed on Google. This really bothers me because my site has 436 links and 508 pages listed on Google and it is only a PR 6. I know that mine could be a high 6 and their's a low 6, but really there is a big difference in terms of the two sites. Also, mine has links from both Yahoo and DMOZ.

I wonder how Google assigns PR and how does one maximize their PR? What internal linking hierarchies work best and how do links from others affect ones site?
I link to about 70 other sites could these links hurt my PR?
I really won't care about PR so much if there wasn't so much empathsis placed on it. For the terms that I compete for, PR makes or breaks a site.

p.s. I saw someone post a link to the NY Times article by David Gallagher. There Toronto site mentioned in that is mine.

[jimbeetle]

Hi again Alan,

'twil always be a mystery. Is it possible that they have tons of links from sites with less then PR4 that don't show up as backlinks in Google?

Why not try a link:www.theirdomain.com search on Alta Vista or a link.all:www.theirdomain.com on alltheweb. That might give a better idea of just how many backlinks they have. (For instance, alltheweb shows 3,921 web pages linking to your site).

And if not that it might just be one of those great Google mysteries.

Jim

[allanp73]

I know life's a mystery :)
I was hoping for a little more. All I want for Christmas is PR7. I hoped that the people who frequent this group could help solve the mystery.
Merry Christmas Jim

[Powdork]

So I checked their back links and noticed they had only 24, all of which were pages from their site and they had about 90 pages listed on Google.

Did you check backlinks for all their pages? Any page receiving an link from an external domain can then effectively spread the pr around within the domain. I feel comfortable saying you can not get a pr 6 without at least one pr 6 or greater backlink to somewhere in your domain.

[Phil_S]

I think these might also may affect the PR rating.

If we're talking about a "shopping mall" store.

1. incoming link text.
( <a href="http://LinkUrl.com">shopping mall</a>)

2. page title from incoming link page.
(<title>Shopping Mall</title>

3. page title the incoming link points to.
(<title>Shopping Mall</title>

[allanp73]

I checked their pages and most were pr5 or less and about 15 were pr6.
After looking at the link I checked... I noticed that I was looking at a page from their site. Still, it only has only 24 links (11 pr 6 and the rest pr5). So many links from pr6 pages does it take to get pr6? Maybe this is normal.

[allanp73]

Hi Phil

The text used in links doesn't affect pr. However it does affect the ranking for search terms. This is why sometimes sites with lower pr rank higher than sites with much highere pr with all other factors considered.