No way should these have the same Toolbar PR

[graeme_p]

I have a rather neglected Planet driven blog aggregator - one page of links and excerpts, an about page, and a feedback form. The only incoming links I know of are from the blogroll of one of the blogs in aggregates, and from those sites that list details of various domains. It is about an year old

It has a toolbar PR of 3.

I have a personal blog that has lots of content and lots of links. Some of the links are high quality: from widely read blogs, from other sites, from people who use (or discuss) my wordpress themes and plugins, from my main site, from a few sites I have done for other people, from social news sites, etc. It has more external links to the home page than the other site has in all, and it has links from content to home page, and deep external links to the content.

It also has a toolbar PR of 3.

How can this happen? Surely lots more links = higher Toolbar PR?

[deadsea]

The difference between PR 3 and PR 4 is a roughly a factor of 6. Does your better site have 6 times the number of links into it? If not it is very possible that they are both PR 3.

[graeme_p]

Easily 6 times the number of links, and much higher quality.

On the blogroll of one blog with homepage PR3 (so from one PR3 page and a lot of PR0 or unranked pages and maybe a few low PR pages all on the same site) and a bunch of unranked sites.

vs

Lots of links from lots of different sites. I just found one from a PR5 page.

[deadsea]

A few more possibilities:
1) The links are not new enough. The toolbar is showing the state of the web as of two or three months ago right now.
2) Googlebot has not found many of the links.
3) Some links are being identified by Google as "paid" and not counted for PR purposes.
4) Google has set the toolbar to lie. It can indicate some sort of penalty, but I think Google does this randomly sometimes too.

Because of the inconsistencies with toolbar PR, I would recommend using other metrics to gauge the reputation of your site.

[superclown2]

Of what earthly use is PR nowadays, except as a marketing tool to link sellers?

[Planet13]

With all due respect, I find it hard to understand why google would actually give any value to "embedded" links in wordpress templates.

They probably still do give value to them, I just don't understand why they would.

also, more importantly that the toolbar PR, what is the TRAFFIC like when you compare the two sites. That is probably a better indication of the real PR, no?

[graeme_p]

@superclown, I agree.

@deadsea, the site with the older links has lower PR, I am talking about pages linking in that have been indexed, I see no reason for Gogle to mark any link as paid (except possibly footer links in templates). I have been suggesting 4) for a long time, but you are the first person to agree with me.

@Planet, themes and plugins generate more links than just the embedded ones in the theme footer. People discuss both on forums, write blog posts mentioning them, etc. For example, ene of my plugins has got links for blog posts and resource lists recommending it for SEO (the funny thing is that I did not write it as an SEO tool!).

The site that I would expect gets more traffic from Google. The other gets hardly any. I agree traffic is what matters, but people do worry about toolbar PR - there is a lot of discussion on this site every time it gets updated.