Should I split off pages because no PageRank has been assigned?

[stan_victor]

< moved from another location >

I have a couple of questions. I have about 300 pages on my site. About 85% of them don't have Google PR assigned. Can we relate Page Rank assigned by google to quality, meaning if a page contains high quality content Google assigns it PR and if it has shallow content then it doesn't and shows it as unranked.
Should such pages be removed and deindexed in order to recover from Panda?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:53 am (utc) on Nov 17, 2011]

[koan]

stan_victor, no that's not how PR works, it is based on the amount of links toward a page, not quality.

[Robert Charlton]

Hi stan_victor, and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I have about 300 pages on my site. About 85% of them don't have Google PR assigned.

How old is the site? Has it had time to attract some good quality inbound links?

Be aware that the PageRank displayed in the Google Toolbar is not current. While PageRank calculations at Google are updated constantly, "Toolbar PageRank" (TBPR) is updated only a few times a year, so it's at best a vague general indicator of whether your pages have PageRank.

PageRank itself, as koan suggests, is not an indicator of page quality... it is a measure of link popularity. There are also numerous other link-associated factors which Google does not display. Much of "Panda" appears to be about onpage factors. I wouldn't use Toolbar PageRank to make any decisions about whether to remove pages from a site.

[Andem]

>> it is based on the amount of links toward a page, not quality

Well yes and no. Mostly no. Actually 100% no.

PageRank is assigned to a page based on the quality and quantity of links linking back to that page. It mostly depends on quality and not quantity. If you have 1 high PR link to your page (let's say PR5), that is of more value than 100 low PR links (let's just say PR1).

I mean we all argue about anchor text, but the question is about PageRank :P

[stan_victor]

I have a 6 year old site and it has around 106k back links shown in WMT. I have had different experience with Page Rank lately. I have had posts with 0 back links but excellent content assigned Page Rank 1-2 by Google with in 7-10 days. In some cases those pages received comments and the maximum was a few Facebooks likes and tweets but that's not true for all posts. On the other hand I have had pages that are 2 year old that are unranked.

[alika]

On the other hand I have had pages that are 2 year old that are unranked.

Is there a way to get ranks for these types of pages where for a long time there's no pagerank?

[jimbeetle]

I have had posts with 0 back links but excellent content assigned Page Rank 1-2 by Google with in 7-10 days.

But the posts are still linked from within the site, no? PageRank flows from internal links also, not just external. See this thread [webmasterworld.com] to get a bit more of a handle on PR basics.