Much higher PR on inner pages than on main page

[eyeneedle]

Here's the deal:

widgets.com has 5 main content pages

widgets.com/stuff1
widgets.com/stuff2
widgets.com/stuff3
widgets.com/stuff4
widgets.com/stuff5

widgets.com and widgets.com/index.html have PR 2

widgets.com/stuff1-5 have PR 5.

widgets.com was until xmas 05 widgets.net. Since the change to .com, lost 80% G traffic and the url and index PR dropped from 5 to 2.

All has been done with sitemaps, .htaccess, etc.

6 months later, its the same. G Traffic only seems to get works, and more and more inner pages have higher PR then widgets.com (about 60 pages have PR 3 and 150 something PR 2)

All content is unique.

Another poor guy hit by G randomness?

[sandpetra]

Yes - I have two inner pr 6's on a 70 page indexed PR 5 site - crazy days!

i was told earlier on this very forum that it's a sign of a good site.

[eyeneedle]

where I say "G traffic only seems to get works" should read "G traffic only seems to get <b>worst</b>"

[nippi]

This, is not randomn. I reckon, you have a problem. Either an error in your html of home page, the error not on the other pages, or the fact that you have both root, and index.html pages being indexed is diluting pr.

I'm guessing BOTh are the problem, unless you have a heap of deep links to the other pages.

Either way, this is not a randomn google problem, your site must have a problem

[tedster]

Historically, having inner pages with a higher PR than the domain root has been a healthy sign -- it "should" mean lots of inbound links to specific, deep pages.

That was historically. The reports we've been hearing are from people who know of no deep IBLs to their site, or at least very few. So I don't think we can use historical standards to understand this current phenomenon, which just became widespread when toolbar PR was updated right after the Big Daddy roll-out was finished. There were lots of PR anomalies reported at that time.

At any rate, these newly discovered high PR pages do not seem to show any results in terms of ranking and Google search traffic. So the general feeling among people I talk to is that something is off, or non-standard, about the way toolbar PR is currently being reported. In some cases (such as this one) it may be that home page PR is calculated one way and other pages are seeing their PR calculated in a "new" and perhaps unintended manner.

It is always traffic that matters. So if a higher PR isn't generating traffic, then what good is it? Well, as long as it lasts, it might help attract more links from those people who worry about PR before they link. So that's at least one silver lining, even if it is a thin one.

I would suggest checking for canonical problems (of the "www" and "index.html" type) and making sure that the domain root resolves as is, with no redirects.

[eyeneedle]

www.widgets.com resolves as is
widgets.com redirects to www.widgets.com
www.widgets.com/index.html resolves as is
widgets.com/index.html redirects to www.widgets.com/index.html

anything wrong here?

[Webdetective]

I'm seeing the same thing on my site. My homepage is PR-4 but my blog page is PR-5, but a couple of my static pages are also PR-5. I don't know if the green pagerank meter on the Google Toolbar really has much meaning anymore. I've seen pages showing PR-5 there yet there are No backlinks. I think maybe Google is trying to confuse us to make SEO more challenging.

Inspite of this great PR in my site, I'm not getting any traffic from Google. MSN has far outshined both Google and Yahoo for me.

[petehall]

I think you'll find it's because we had a weird PR update, where inner pages were assigned a new rank but home pages remained constant.

No doubt to be fixed soon!

[Webdetective]

Is it true Google is only updating their index 4 times a year? I haven't seen any changes to mine for a few months.

[eyeneedle]

I would not mind a 4 times / year update on PR/IBls like in the past.

I haven't seen anything happening in 2006, afaik.
I've an handful of sites, and they all report the same ibls and pr from december 28, 2005.

[Marcia]

>>Is it true Google is only updating their index 4 times a year?

It's visible toolbar PR that's being updated around every three months.

[Webdetective]

But isn't the Google backlinks also? Both site:www and link:www searches for my domain are showing the same links for over the past 3 months. It seems Google does not continuously add new links with time as do other search engines. Last time they added them all at once during the last major SERPs update months ago.