Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
One of the first things I noticed as my site started to disappear from the Google SERPs was that my page rank disappeared (it turned grey). Shortly after that my site had vanished from Google entirely (although it still ranks well on Yahoo and is starting to come back on MSN).
Here's the the strange part: After the most recent Google PR update PageRank started appearing again on my site. While my home page (previously the only page with PageRank) dropped from a 5 to a 4, nearly every other page on my site now has PageRank. I've got at least eight PR 5 pages, and loads of PR4 pages. New pages that didn't exist on my old site now have page rank as well. Meanwhile, my pages are still nowhere to be found in Google SERPs.
This raises many questions:
1. Obviously something I've done has caused my site to be filtered by Google. Is the return of PageRank and the increase in ranking of individual pages a sign that I may be slowly coming back in Google?
2. How is it that my home page dropped to PR 4 while several internal pages suddenly got a PR 5? A couple of these pages have inbound links from various sites, but most don't.
3. How is it that entirely new pages that are not linked from any external sites suddenly have page rank (some have a PR4)? Is it possible to generate page rank exclusively through a site's internal linking structure? That doesn't seem right.
I know many of you think Page Rank is dead - or at the very least overrated, but I'm not ready to write it off entirely. Especially when the recent PR update raise so many interesting questions.
Your new pages have pagerank because they have links from other pages on your site. It's pagerank, not siterank.
There are a couple of possible reasons why your home page's PR dropped. One is that Google hasn't reindexed all of your pages yet, so the PR isn't fully updated yet. Another is that PR may have been rescaled to a large enough degree to put you in the "PR4" category instead of "PR5". Remember that the number you see with the toolbar isn't your real PR, it's a scaled down number based on your PR and is calculated with a formula that isn't made available to the public.
That page links to a download page containing links to download the software and links to the boilerplate user agreement. Google only shows one link to that page; Yahoo shows a few more. It now has PR5; I don't know what it was before, but it's just a download page, it shouldn't rank that high from a user's standpoint or from the standpoint of getting a lot of quality links.
This might have something to do with a 302 redirect hijack or because I redirected www to non-www a few months ago. Or, it might mean something's amiss at google.
I had kind of hoped that the re-appearance of PageRank was an indication that I would slowly start climbing back into the SERPs. That hasn't been the case.
So based on your explaination am I to understand that it's possible for a page to gain PR solely from internal site links? That appears to be the case for me. It doesn't really make sense. New pages that didn't exist until shortly before the most recent PR update are now PR5 based solely on internal links from a site with a PR4 home page. That rank must be based on the aggregate of internal links from throughout the site. Even then it seems like it would be entirely too easy to manufacture Page Rank.
I'm starting to see why so many people believe page rank is overrated.
Then, Google updated the toolbar and pages show PR again, but it is different than before changes you made, because you made structural changes. That's the structure of the site what decides how much pagerank certain pages will get.
If you have many links from deep pages back to '/', and additionally deep pages have their own inbounds, so they have high PR, it can increase main page PR, just by this internal linking.
The opposite, if you make heavy linking between all pages of certain level, for example, on each page there are links to other pages from the same hierarchy level, these pages will accumulate PR instead of returning it to main page or spreading to lower level pages or giving away with outbound links. It's quite common that pages one level lower than main page have the same or higher PR than main page, just because they have links to them from main page, from each one of them and from lower level pages. But these pages contain the most important keywords, if the site is well optimised, so it's not bad.
You have to rethink your internal linking, because your site always have certain sum of PageRank on all its pages (not sum of numbers in toolbar, but in real, not logarithmed PR value), and internal linking decides how this is spread among the site. Of course, other criteria is where the PR flows in (to which pages external inbounds point), but internal linking decides where this PR is passed in the site.
