link juice from deep backlinks?

does PR trickle down through all pages of a site?

[luispunchy]

I searched and found one post here from 2 years ago that asserts that PR is per page and not per site, but the poster qualifies that with "only Google knows how it really works."

Using various PR checking tools, I see that PR (regardless of value, 0 - 10) gets reported at the domain level but always comes up null when I put in a full URL with subdirectories i.e. anything past the home page...

So what's the consensus? If I get a backlink on a site that has a high PR on the domain (www.example.com), but my backlink is actually located deeper on that site - say at www.example.com/really/buried/deep.htm - does that link come endorsed by the full weight of the linking domain's PR or is that link juice "diluted" so to speak?

How about if there are query strings on the page where the backlink resides - does that kill the link juice?

[rainborick]

PageRank is a page-level - or more precisely, a URL-level attribute. The PageRank-passing value of any link is dependent on the PageRank score of the page where the link resides and the number of links on that page. And you have to keep in mind that all of the online tools get their PageRank information from the same source - the Google Toolbar PageRank database. At most, they can detect differences in this database across Google's various datacenters. And since that database is only updated every 3-4 months, it will often not show any PageRank data for URLs that were created since the database was last updated.

So if a page shows no PageRank data, then it might be because the URL hasn't been added to the PageRank database or it could be because Google simply hasn't crawled/indexed it. Pages buried deeply in directories are often not indexed these days and even when they are indexed they rarely carry any significant ranking value.

Links do carry some value that is related to the overall domain, which is often referred to as 'TrustRank', but the details of this concept are known only to Google. And as with PageRank, it only counts if the page is in the index.

The value of PageRank in Google's ranking methods is the object of endless arguments these days, and I really hope that this thread doesn't devolve into yet another series of meaningless bickering messages on the subject. The best advice is probably that you shouldn't ignore PageRank, but don't obsess over it. Build a good site that users will appreciate and work on getting links from quality websites, and you'll do well in the long run.