Flow of PR to Sub Pages

[member22]

Hello,

I am not sure what you call it when you have let's say a PR of 3 on your homepage and then your first sub menus ( the one just under the homepage ) get a PR or 2 and so on... I have one issue, I have 5 sub menus 4 of them have a PR one under the home page but one on them doesn't have any PR and I don't understand why google would skip the PR of one of my sub menus / sub pages?

Thanks,

[tedster]

Do you mean that the toolbar shows gray? If so, there are some mysteries about when and why Google chooses to graybar some pages - but the general observation is that they feel those pages are not good landing pages for search: collections of links with minimal other content, for example.

[member22]

I don't use the gray bar, I just use a firefox plug in that gives me the PR of all my pages and I have 5 similar pages in the same menu ( green widget, blue widget , black widget ... ) and only 4 out of 5 have a PR and I don' understand why because they are all similar landing pages with good content ? ( it is not a contact us or terms and conditions pages ) which I can understand has no interest for google.

So i am wondering what i need to do to give this page a PR ? i don't know if there is an error in the code or that page that blocks it from getting PR or else ...

Thank you,

[tedster]

What does your plug-in tell you? N/A (no data) or 0?

If your page is indexed, then it is eligible to get PR. Just put the url into Google's search box and see if you get a result.

[member22]

The plug-in tells me N/A and the page is indexed ( I find it when I put the URL in google search box ) ? what does that mean ?

Thanks,

[tedster]

That's what the Google Toolbar would show as gray. It's not always clear why Google chooses not to show PR for some pages, but a low level of text content can be one reason.

If the internal linking is equivalent to the other subpages (first thing to check), and this page also has significant useful content and not mostly images or a link collection (second thing to check) then you have one of the more mysterious graybar pages.

One thing you didn't mention is whether the page is getting search traffic. If it is, you may just need to forget about the PR.

[CainIV]

Make sure that the page shows up in number one position for unique text pulled from it, in quotes. Your page should be returned in position 1.

I have found that for client pages I have published, when others scrape the content and for whatever reason gain more trust for the scraped data than mine, often the fails to receive pagerank, update after update.

[member22]

I still don't understand why google doesn't show a PR for one of my subpage ( my contact page got a PR of 3 and one of the most important subpages on my website as N/A.

So, when google shows N/A as far as PR does it mean it has no PR or does it mean that google doesn't want to show it in order for seo " masters " not to be able to do reverse algorithm ?

Thanks,

[tedster]

We don't know what n/a means in any specific case. All we know is that the toolbar does not make the data available. That's why I said there are mysteries about this.

IMO you are better off to focus on traffic than the toolbar or a PR plug-in, which taps into the same data. Unless you become a Google search engineer, there are some questions you may never answer.

[member22]

I agree with you it is hard to figure everything out about google but one last thing, how can you explain that one of my websites has a PR on the homepage and not anywhere else ?

( I just have 2 links for the homepage of that site so far , could it be the reason why only homepage has a PR and the other subpages don't have any PR ? )

Thanks,

[tedster]

Right - only two links doesn't give much PR to circulate. But even on sites I work with that have a high PR home page, I rarely have any concern about the internal PR numbers -- or lack of them. After all, the goal of a website is to reach people, not to get green pixels.

So if an intermediate tool of any kind isn't being helpful toward that goal of traffic and/or conversions, then I just start to ignore it. Life's too short.

[member22]

Tedster from reading what you said earlier "One thing you didn't mention is whether the page is getting search traffic. If it is, you may just need to forget about the PR" does it means that if a page doesn't have traffic it is normal that it doesn't get any PR ?

In my case it would mean that the page I am talking about doesn't have a PR because it receives less traffic than my contact page and that is why the contact page has a PR ?

Thank you,

[tedster]

I didn't mean to imply that traffic affects PR - it doesn't, to my knowledge. Inbound links affect PR.

Let me say it another way. The goal is traffic from Google, correct? If you are getting that search traffic, then I say who cares what the publicly visible PR number is.

[member22]

< moved from another location >

Hi everyone,

I was browsing my site and noticed google just updated the PR of my site ...
in the last 5 months I haven't changed anything on my site and some of the pages that had a PR of 3 now of N/A and pages that had a PR of N/A now have 3...

Even one of the pages has 4 which is as much as my homepage ?
How can that be possible ?

Thank you,

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:45 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2009]

[tedster]

Any page can have as high or even higher PR than the home page. It all depends on external backlinks and internal linking for circulating that link juice.

[Robert Charlton]

member22 - With regard to TBPR that displays as N/A, also discussed as "gray bar" or "grey bar" PR... if you check in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page, you will find a good reference thread about this issue...

The Grey Bar PR0 Phenomenon
[webmasterworld.com...]

I suggest that you read the discussion, and that you do some reading in many of the other Hot Topics threads. They should be very helpful in answering all sorts of questions you've been asking.

Also, reread some of the answers here. They should cover most of your concerns about N/A - graybar, but you haven't responded to whether they apply.