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I assume the internal pages inherit their PR from this page - can anyone shine any light on the discrepancy?
(You can sticky mail me the URL.)
There are not many pages on this site (about 20) and most of them can be reached directly from each other. Because of this 'nearly flat' structure, PR is probably similar for most of the pages, i.e. PR is either a high PR5 or a low PR6.
I compare two PR6 pages with the index page to find reasons for this phenomenon.
- There are backlinks from all pages to the index page (as far as I could see)
- Nearly all of the incoming links are to the index page. For one of the two PR6 pages which I have examined, I found an additional PR4 incoming link. However, the other PR6 page has none.
- Google considers www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html as the same page. Thus, a split of PR is not an explanation.
- The number of links on the pages seems to be also not the solution. For one of the PR6 pages exists more than one backlink on the pages (which could explain higher (transferred) PR for this page), however, the other PR6 page has just one backlink on each other page (as far as I have found so far)
Therefore, one has to look for other explanations.
If the structure of the pages is unchanges for the last 2 month, i.e. since the deep crawl before the last update (WebManager, can you confirm this?), then it seems that PR calculation is treated differently than in the original algorithm. For example, one can think of:
- graphik links doesn't count the same a text links (the backlink to the homepage is a graphic link)
- transferred PR depends on the position of the link
- link within the navigation template doesn't count the same as other links
Of course, this is speculation, but I haven't found a better explanation so far. (I will examine this site in more detail the next days.)
WebManager,
do you want to change the structure in such a way that the homepage is a PR6 page? Independent from the reason for the actual distribution of PR, you can change it. However, you can change the distribution, but the total PR (sum over all pages) will be unchanged. Thus increasing the PR for your homepage will decease some other pages. However, if your homepage is more important in your eyes (and also because Google seems to favour homepages in the results) you should do this.
When Google links to your site, they are linking right to the domain, www.domain.com, right?
When your internal links link to your home page, are they linking to the index.html file, or are they linking back to the domain? For intance:
www.domain.com
-or-
/
Or are you linking to:
index.html
-or-
/index.html
If the latter, then you should change it to the former. Google sees the first set and the second set as linking to two different pages, even though they both link to your home page.. and some PR is given to the first set by your incoming links, and some is being given to the second set by your internal links.
the pages are linked to index.html not to www.domain.com. However, as already mentioned I examined this. Google shows for link:www.domain.com the same backlinks as for link:www.domain.com/index.html. Thus I concluded that Google see this as one page.
Even if Google distinguish between these pages, then the index.html should have the same PR as one of the PR6 pages, which has just one incoming links from every other page and no external incoming links. (Hopefully, I don't overlooked anything important.)
I have already checked this using alltheweb, but no additional backlinks are shown.
<the pages are linked to index.html not to www.domain.com. However, as already mentioned I examined this. Google shows for link:www.domain.com the same backlinks as for link:www.domain.com/index.html. Thus I concluded that Google see this as one page.>
I just verified this, and you're right. I hadn't seen this before.. new to me :-).
There is somehing perhaps worthy of note - at one time there was a tracked inbound link to index, something like: index/?fav.
If I navigate to the index page using this URL it has a PR4 (honest!).
I'm not particularly worried about the discrepancy (although it would probably be beneficial for the index page to have PR6 due to the importance Google attaches to index pages) - I'm pleased to see it's generated so much interest!
Google does give seperate PRs to www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html.
From my experience the best thing to do is point your internal pages at www.domain.com otherwise your splitting the available PR.
Mike
I had another thought, I use some advertising which uses deep inclusion - few SE placed ads (if any) point to my index page - perhaps there is a large number of weak inbound links to the shop pages.
For my site the situation is the following: www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.de are pointing to the same space. All significant incoming links are going to the "de" domain. However, the PR is independent from the domain. Google knows that these sites are identical since link:www.mydomain.de as well as link:www.mydomain.com yield all backlinks. Thus there is no split (even in this case).
