Real PR versus Guessed PR...

How can you tell..

[riadn]

I recently created a Geocities site and to my shock and amazement the site had a PR value of 7.

Eureka I thought!... maybe i'd stumbled across something which everyone seemed to have missed... don't bother wasting time and effort getting backlinks... just create a few Geocities sites, link them to your pages and before you know it your sites are no.1 on Google for all the Keywords you desire...

Then it dawned on me that this PR was fake... more research and it turns out this is the guessed PR based on www.geocities.com.

Now the simple question is how can you tell if a PR is guessed or real.
One pattern I noticed is that a site has PR => 4 and if it doesn't have any backlinks in google then the PR is guessed.

So would it be correct in saying that is a site has a PR=>4 and has backlinks in google then the PR is real.

[doc_z]

A page (independet from the PR) that is in the index and has backlinks in google, has real PR.
However, this doesn't mean that a page which has no backlinks in google, is necessarily guessed. The reason is that only backlinks with PR>=PR4 are shown. However, if the PR for that site is high (e.g. PR7), one can assume that normally there must be incoming links from pages with PR>=PR4 if that PR is real.

[Craig_F]

check the google cache. if the page doesn't show there, but you see PR you can assume it's guessed.

[anallawalla]

allinurl: geocities.com site:geocities.com

I looked at a random handful of Geocities sites and it seems that PR5 is the exception and PR6 is more common, with some PR7s being genuine as well. They are in the cache and have lots of backlinks.

e.g. the first offers free clipart and has PR7 with 1900+ backlinks. The poetry man has PR6 and lots of guest book backlinks.

There is definitely some advantage in being hosted there, but you still need to follow the usual SEO practices.

- Ash

[doc_z]

I agree with Craig_F: if the page isn't shown in the google cache, PR is guessed. However, if the page is shown this does't mean necessarily that PR is real.

anallawalla

I don't think that your search show that there is an advantage in being hosted at Geocities. The reason that you have just found high PR sites is that high PR sites appear first in the search results. (Just to avoid a misunderstanding: the results in this case are not only ordered by PR, but this is an important factor.) And even if you look at positions about 1000, this is small compared to the number of results: 3,360,000.

[zgb999]

Take pages from search engines (Altavista...) as an example. They also have (in my eyes) a guessed PR for any page generated by a query but being listed there doesn't give you a backlink.

I checked some of the Geocities sites and they have their pagerank because of the links pointing to them. It doesn't look like Geocities has anything to do with this.

[anallawalla]

That's why I said "but you still need to follow the usual SEO practices" and mentioned the high number of backlinks I saw in the SERP.

Perhaps it is better to say that there is no inherent detriment in hosting there.

I just created a site there with only one inbound link (from PR2) and one outbound link (to PR6). I will wait for it to be picked up in a month or two.