High, medium and low pagerank in webmaster central

absolute or relative? linear or logarithmic?

[Oliver Henniges]

The webmaster central console offers an overview on the distribution of pagerank over the various pages on a domain. How are these graphics to be interpreted?

My mainpage has a PR of 4. I doubt this is really "high", but it shows a very thin green bar there. So are these values relative to the other pages of my domain or absolute compared to other websites?

I have approximately 1200 pages indexed in total. There are two very thin green bars under "high" and "medium," and a very long green bar under "low." Should I work on my internal link-structure? I tried to distribute about 100 links from the main-page quite balanced, and thus about 60-80 of my pages show a TBPR of "3". This would indicate that the graphics work with a linear scale, which seems a bit inappropriate to me.

[tedster]

Since the PR scale itself is already roughly logarithmic, there's no reason to introduce more log scaling into the "low-medium-high' rating. Still,who knows. The only purpose of the graphics is to communicate to the webmaster so they may have chosen whatever they felt would best make the point visually.

I'd say having 80 PR3 urls out of a 1200 url site with a PR4 home page is a very good distribution. You may want to look at whether all those 80 PR3 urls are worthy of their PR level in your mind, but you've spread the PR quite well. You may be giving some of those urls too many internal links, or not giving enough internal linking to other urls, and so on. That's your own judgement to make. I find that 100 links on the home page is usually too high a number - and it can confuse Google's relevance scoring a bit.

While sculpting your internal PR circulation can help a few urls get more PR, there is always a limit that depends on how many backlinks you've got from other domains - the most certain way to improve PR is to get more links from other sites.

There's a difference between making ends meet by holding to a tight budget, and earning more money in the first place.

[Oliver Henniges]

> no reason to introduce more log scaling into the "low-medium-high' rating

Not for the rating, but for the number of pages leading to a green bar of either length.

My thumb rule says a maximum of 80(?) links on a given page still passes a PR of N-1 to the subpages linked to from there. So with my PR4 and 80 second-level PR3pages, i might probably get 80*80 = 6400 pages indexed with a PR2, provided distributiuon is equally balanced. and then 80*80*80 pages with a PR1.

I know this is not precise, but I think it demonstates that here indeed comes another logarithm into play, which has to do with the length of those tiny little bars. I was just wondering about how to interpret them. I think my explanation and figures indicate that the graphics-length is working with a linear scale, which is not appropriate. I'd like to know from others whether they view similar results in their account.

> There's a difference between making ends meet by holding to a tight budget, and earning more money in the first place.

how true.