PageRank

[needinfo]

PR confuses me sometimes. I have read quite a lot on Googe PR and alway see contradictions. In this case I have seen a site which has a homepage and apporximately 40 sub pages. the homepage has a PR 5 so i would have thought that all the sub pages would have PR 4..they don't they also have PR 5. All of the sub pages only seem to have 1-2 inbound links one of which is from the homepage. Any suggestions.

[ciml]

Unless the internal pages link to each other, but not back to the home page, it seems odd for all forty of them to be PR5 if they only receive PageRank via a PR5 page.

I suspect that there's some more PageRank coming into them from somewhere.

[rogerd]

It could be as simple as the difference between the home page being a "high" PR5 (e.g., 5.49) and the others being "low" PR5s (e.g., 4.51), couldn't it? (Not really sure if the decimal examples are appropriate for a log-based PR calculation, but you get the idea...) It does seem a bit unusual, but not out of the question. I have some sites where some sub pages show the same rank as the home page and others don't.

I'm sure if the sub-pages (apparently) ranking as well as the home page is a problem, GoogleGuy can correct that in the next update... ;)

[ciml]

I think the examples are fine, Roger. Whether you treat it as 4.51 to 5.49 or 5.01 to 5.99, needinfo's data represent one notch variation on the Toolbar scale.

I don't see how you could supply forty pages with enough PageRank to be on the same Toolbar notch as the page that gives it to them, except with good feedback among the internal pages and no major PR leakage back to the home page.

[Marcia]

On one site it isn't 40, but I just counted - there are 21 internal pages that have had PR5, same as the homepage. The homepage just made PR6, but it was hovering on the brink for a few months at a high PR5 with the internal pages PR5 also.

It wasn't so at one point, back when we started work on it. The static information root pages had a 4, and three content pages that I added in their own directories were PR5, same as the homepage. Their navigation was different, less diluted than the other static pages, of which there were only a few, all lower than my three.

There are links to dynamic shopping cart pages, I excluded the cart directory with robots.txt for good measure. For the most part, any of those need to be two clicks away from the homepage, not one.

On a few sites of my own the internal pages are one lower than the homepage, except for one where they've all been the same for a while - it's a much higher PR5.

[ciml]

That reads like perfect PageRank behaviour, Marcia. My working theory has the threshold higher than 21 and lower than 40, hence my initial surprise at needinfo's description.

Looking into it further, I think it could be possible to have many more than 40 internal pages if the PR feedback is optimised (hundreds, if I'm not mistaken).