Links are up, but PR is low

Why Don't I have higher PR?

[swingandmiss]

Didn't know if this should be placed in the Marketing World or Google forum. But here it is.

I'm an owner of a blog network. We're about 6 months old. All of the established blogs are doing quite well, with a PR5 or higher. There's one blog with a PR problem.

Here's some data.

Link Popularity Check
Problem site (PR3): 3366
Site 1 (PR6) : 5478
Site 2 (PR5) : 3332
Site 3 (PR5) : 3302

Seach Engine Saturation
Problem site (PR3): 810
Site 1 (PR6) : 699
Site 2 (PR5) : 470
Site 3 (PR5) : 250

Inbound link count from technorati.com
Problem site (PR3): 59 links from 27 sites
Site 1 (PR6) : 47 links from 16 sites
Site 2 (PR5) : 33 links from 10 sites
Site 3 (PR5) : 10 links from?

The PR problem wouldn't really be an issue because it's one of the top in terms of traffic. However, one of the advertising services (we think) uses PR to set ad prices. This has drastically affect the ability of the site to earn much.

The problem site was one of the first launched. The problem site updates almost daily with relevant, good content. All the sites are build with the same backend, so meta tags and format are identical.

So I'm wondering why doesn't this site have a higher PR?
The only thing I can think of is that this site received a number of inbound links within a short time period due to a photography challenge. Many of the linking sites used a quote of the invitation to join the challenge. Could this be affecting PR?

Thanks.

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:50 pm (utc) on June 9, 2006]
[edit reason] TOS/Edited formatting. [/edit]

[Nicke]

You give statistics from all search engines (Marketleap?) but your problem is with Google (PR). I am sure your problem site does not have same number of inbound links as your PR5/6 sites if you check the links in Google.

The answer is easy, you need more quality inbound links that Google count. Links counted with MSN or Yahoo dont mean Google accept these links and thus give you higher PR for your problem site.

[Nicke]

Also, dont forget Google havent updated the visible toolbar PR for a while, the real PR may be higher (if inbound links when checking with Google is similar to the other sites as links has been updated more frequently) but just not showing yet.

[swingandmiss]

Inbound links counted by google (using link:)

Problem site (PR3): 52
Site 1 (PR6) : 60
Site 2 (PR5) : 52
Site 3 (PR5) : 52

So you see the inbound links are similar. It's a little strange that 3 are identical. Upon closer look, most of the links for site 2 and 3 are from the network, not external links. The problem site actually has quite a few more real links than either of those two sites.

[swingandmiss]

One other thing to note, the problem site had a PR3 before the last update. The other 3 sites had PR1 or lower and all jumped up.

[swingandmiss]

OK. So I used link: in the google search incorrectly. Here are the corrected google inbound link counts.

Problem site (PR3): 160
Site 1 (PR6) : 105
Site 2 (PR5) : 37
Site 3 (PR5) : 26

This actually makes more sense and what I was expecting in the first place (from server logs and referral logs). So my question remains, why does the problem site have a lower PR than the others (especially site 2 and 3)?

[rkhare]

One other thing to note, the problem site had a PR3 before the last update. The other 3 sites had PR1 or lower and all jumped up.

i am not an expert in the subject, but as far as jumping of other sites is concerned, pls check February/March posts in this forum. IMHO, the last update was not a complete update, just improvement due to swithcing over to new infrastructure. lots of new pages created between december and march showed steep rise in PR but older pages remained almost same.