Few Backlinks, Many Pages

[globay]

I am planning to launch a big shopping site with a few
thousand pages. Using Url rewriting, no page should be
more than 1 or 2 levels from the root directory.

Now if www.mydomain.com gets a PR of 5, how is the PR
distributed? I once heard, that a site only has a certain
amount of PageRank, that is then distributed to all the
subpages.

Having thousands of pages it is impossible to link to each
page from the index page. Though the subpages are just one
level from the root directory, you might have to click 3
or 4 times to get to the actual product description page.

How much PageRank would this product page probably have?
(rough guess)

That is the Linking structure

index.html > cat1.html > cat2.html > cat3.html > cat3/product.html

www.domain.com/cat3/product.html

My guess is, that I get only PR 1, because I have
to "click" 4 times to get there. On the other hand: PR 3
would make sense, too, since it is one level down!

Thanks for your help!

--
globay

[hakre]

hi globay.

pr is calculated for each page/url individually. don't count on the pr in the google toolbar which is post-calculated only. so any of your sites can get it's own pr and you won't loose a thing by your url-layout.

the structure of your urllayout is good to keep the urls se-friendly.

[Night_Hawk]

I would think it is how many jumps it takes Googlebot to get there from the index page.

If googlebot has to go through all these pages index.html > cat1.html > cat2.html > cat3.html > cat3/product.html
and you started with PR5 then you will have a very low PR for the product page. I could be wrong though.

[Powdork]

Look for a thread here on the pyrmamid marketing.. err, pryamid linking... err, that sounds spammy too. Anyway, go here.
[searchengineworld.com...]

I also like to go out and hunt for links for those subdirectories and whenever possible, the product pages. After all, those are your money pages anyway. Who cares who sees your home page? In many cases it will be easier.
Always remember, PR is for a page only. The PR for any given page is the sum of the portion of pr given by all the pages linking to it that are in the Google index (with links read by Gbot) regardless of whether or not they show up as backlinks. It does not matter whether the link comes from within the domain or not.
The same goes for anchor text. Just because its from a page with not enough pr to show up in backlinks doesn't mean it doesn't help. What this means is that a link to a subdirectory or product page will provide the anchor/alt text needed to propel the page for the proper search while the pr derived from the link will be spread to the entire site and help with all other searches. Let Google take care of your site navigation for you.

[globay]

pr is calculated for each page/url individually.

That means, if the product page just gets links from one
or two category sites, its PR is very low. Can anybody
confirm this?

Are there ways to improve the PR for the product page?

<edited> Thanks Powdork </edited>