This Makes NO Sense! - page with highest PR in Webmaster Tools

[AndyA]

Something is just not right. In Google Webmaster Tools, it lists the page on your site with the highest page rank. For my site, it lists a page that has absolutely NO incoming links from external sites, and only ONE internal link. Further, it is 3 clicks from the home page.

The page listed is not an important page at all, and really doesn't have all that much information on it compared to other pages higher up the ladder.

The home page has a PR of 4 or 5 depending on which datacenter you connect to, and the page listed in tools has a PR of 3 on all datacenters. This page has held this spot for the past 3 months, prior to that it was the home page.

How can this possibly be? What am I missing in this calculation?

[Bewenched]

Humm.. went to go check mine, but all my stats show this message:

-----------
Data is not available at this time. Please check back later for statistics about your site.

[texasville]

It may have a link you are unaware of?

[AndyA]

Perhaps Google knows of I link that I'm not aware of, but it seems under these conditions it would have to be from a page with a very high PR, and I don't seem to be getting a lot of traffic to that page, just the normal amount I get to similar pages on my site.

[Marketing Guy]

I found the same for a fairly large site (250k+ pages) with plenty of inbound links to the homepage - a random deep content page (relatively insignificant subject) was listed as highest PR for Nov. However, it did change over the past week and now Google Sitemaps shows the homepage as highest PR again.

Maybe just a glitch.

MG

[texasville]

MG is probably right ...just a glitch but check your backlinks in yahoo using linkdomain.

[contentwithcontent]

Hi, I have noticed this as well.

This seems to be a glitch that occurs and lasts about two week in my case.

I have seen it happen twice in the last 6 months or so,

Each time the same thing occured:

Highest pagerank page was listed as my homepage
Then my faq was listed as highest page rank for two weeks
Went back to my homepage being listed

I have no idea why

[wanderingmind]

Yep this is a glitch. I posted abut sometime back here. Very irritating though.

What I get worried about is, is this a symptom of some problem on the site in internal linking etc..

[knjemily]

For what it is worth, I had it happen during and shortly after we went through a 12 week penalty period when our SERP's dropped significantly (by the 100's). If I remember right it took a couple of weeks to right itself to the correct page.

[AndyA]

Update:

This page is still showing as the page with the highest Page Rank on my site. It has now been this way for the last 4 months.

As I said, it makes no sense whatsoever. I'm wondering if this is some indication or insight as to the problems I've been having with my site ranking. There is absolutely no reason why this page would have the higest Page Rank.

In fact, if Page Rank drops by one with every click from the home page, it would look like this:

Home PR=5
Category PR=4
Topic PR=3
Page PR=2

That is the link structure to get to that page. Now how in the world could it possibly be the page with the highest PR for 3 months in a row?

Something is seriously screwed up - I just don't know if it's my site or Google, but whatever it is it might be the key to my problems.

Any ideas how I would go about investigating this?

Edit to add: I just checked my internal site link structure. 6 other pages in my site link to this page, including the Site Map. Similar pages would also have this same link structure. Why would this page benefit so much from this when other similar pages do not?

When searching Google for the page title, it comes up #1 and has an indented page below it. This indented page would also have a similar internal incoming link structure.

[edited by: AndyA at 4:02 pm (utc) on Dec. 3, 2006]

[knjemily]

Do you pages validate? That was a contributing problem causing the same thing with us (had an extra "</td>"). The validation problem showed up in the sitemap as a "could not follow" error. We also had a lower level page showing up as the top page.
Ken

[WiseWebDude]

I've seen the same situation: A lowly product page deep within one of our websites shows in Webmaster Tools as having the highest page rank. Made absolutely no sense... Until we found a PR9 website linking to that product page.

There is probably an incoming link with high PR that you don't yet know about. Remember, toolbar PR is yesterday's news (months old). The information shown in Webmaster Tools appears to be current.

[dibbern2]

I'm wondering if this is some indication or insight as to the problems I've been having with my site ranking.

I think it is. Read the other post above that mentions ranking problems and this quirk.

The same thing happened to me on Nov 27, when a bunch of pages got whacked by 200-400 places in the serps. Have you tried a search for your domain? Where does your index page (the page that SHOULD have the highest ranking)come up?

[g1smd]

Back in September someone reported that their highest PR page was being reported as Page X for July, but that in August it had reported that in July, Page Z was the one with the highest PR.

[LunaC]

g1smd, I see that a lot.

On one of my sites it happens almost every month, but on that one it might make sense that the pages do change which is highest.. (that shouldn't change historical data), but the index and an inner section do seem to get around the same amount of IBL. This site *Touch wood* is doing well in all engines.

On another site that is having huge problems in Google, it's like it's totally random. Every month a different one is higher, then the next month the historical data changes to another random page.

On a bit of a side note, maybe Google is trying to be honest about their umm.. inaccuracy ;) .. take a look at the bottom of that page in Sitemaps, there's always a quote. I've seen:

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.
— Evan Esar (1899-1995), American Humorist

and:

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
— Mark Twain (1835-1910), [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] American author, humorist

[AndyA]

According to the Google toolbar, this page has a PR of 3. There are no backlinks to it. So, the other pages on my site that link to it apparently don't have enough PR to do any good, or Google just doesn't want to report them for some reason.

When I do a site: search in Webmaster Tools, the pages I would expect to see first are indeed first: my home page, then a couple of pages that are more heavily linked to within my site.

My home page shows a PR of 4 or 5 according to everything I've seen, so it is definitely a higher PR than the page showing. I really suspect this has something to do with my suppressed results in the Google index.

The html does validate, although some of the pages are code heavy (older html code) which I am in the process of updating and cleaning up. I'm beyond mystified about this. The page chosen really makes no sense at all, none.

[dibbern2]

Don't do a site: search, search for your domain and see where your index page ranks.

[AndyA]

My index page comes up at #1 for its name, domain, etc., and a secondary site page is indented just below it. It didn't a year or so ago, when a lot of other sites were mentioning the same thing about searching for their unique site name, and finding it at #50 or whatever. Later, my pages all went to URLs only in the index, with no page titles or snippets. That has been replaced by the meta contents tags now.

I do still have pages without meta contents tags, and I'm updating them daily, but unless those pages have the ability to pull down all the others in the site, I'm at a loss to see the connection.

I've looked all over for high PR links pointing to this page with the highest PR according to Google, and there is simply nothing out there.

[edited by: AndyA at 12:27 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2006]

[AndyA]

Now I've got the dreaded

"No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index. Indexing can take time. You may find it helpful to review our information for webmasters and webmaster guidelines."

notice showing in Webmaster Tools. Yet according to the index, I have over a thousand pages indexed. I think Google has a few bugs to work out of this still.

[knjemily]

I wouldn't continue persuing PR. It appears to be okay so it isn't the problem.

Based upon what we have had happen to us, I would look at duplicate titles, duplicate content and 302 redirects. I am assuming (dangerous) that most of your pages are NOT supplemental. If most are supplemental, then there may be a duplicate content issue.

Have you tried the inurl: tool to see if someone has grabbed your home page?
Ken