Unusual Backlinks

[boxercrazy]

I have been trying to keep up with the Google threads, phew a lot of talk. I was wondering if anyone else had seen odd sets of backlinks showing for their site?

I am not talking about missing backlinks, which seems to be a common theme here. I am talking about internal, deep pages showing in the backlinks.

For example, I have a muffin site (not really, I get tired of reading about widgets and like muffins a lot better ;) and the last time the homepage pagerank was updated it was a 4 with only 5 backlinks showing. On the site there is a forum for muffin discussions and the link structure of the site is setup like below:

Home Page (PR 4) links to Forum Portal (PR 3) links to Forum Threads (PR 2).

In this new update I have maybe 20 forum threads showing up in my backlinks for the homepage. These do not have any other incoming links other than from the forum portal.

My question is three parts.

1. Why would only 20 of these show up for backlinks as there are about 6500 threads indexed?

2. If these pages went to a PR 4 to show up as backlinks, would it be safe to say that the Forum Portal Page went to a PR 5 and homepage to a PR 6 since the threads themselves do not have any other incoming link other than the Forum Portal so it would most likely increased?

3. Has anyone else seen this with sites they work on? The odd backlinks, I still can not figure out why only a few would show, maybe the rest will be added later?

[takagi]

1. You already wrote that backlinks will show if the PR is high enough. Both the page linking and the page being linked must be above some limit. This was a middle PR4, but now I also see several PR3 pages with backlinks and from your posting I understand you even have PR2's, so it looks the limit was lowered. The PR on the toolbar is a whole number, so it is very well possible that 2 pages both have the same PR on the toolbar, but one is above the limit and another is not.

2. It is unlikely that the forum threads would get a significant higher PR if there are no direct links to those threads from other sites. New pages will generate some PR, but the inbound PR to your site will also spread over more pages if you add new ones. So a more likely scenario is in the opposite direction. If you get more inbound links, the PR of the home page will go up, this will cause a higher PR for the Forum Portal Page, and so will the forum threads. But having more threads could help to get more links from other sites. So in that way, new threads can help your whole site.

[ogletree]

I too have seen a lot of PR2's in my backlinks. I guess they did lower it. I was hoping they actually were PR3's but the toolbar was wrong.

[ct2000]

yep my site was a PR4 with about 12 backlinks before the last update - not its a PR3 with 55 backlinks from internal links (that now have PR2) ... so the bar has defenently been lowered - happy to sticky mail anyone who is interested in seeing this phenomenon ...

[boxercrazy]

Thanks for the information everyone. I am still wondering if the PR is lowered why all the forum threads would not show, only specific ones? They all have the exact same linking structure and the only link pointing to them is the forum portal page and so each forum thread should have the exact same PR as the outgoing and incoming link is the exact same on each page. Yet only 20 or so random ones show for backlinks?

I checked the other datacenters this morning and it looks like all my backlinks other than internal pages no longer shows on any of the datacenters other than -fi. Who knows, don't think I will worry about it until everything is finished.

[doc_z]

I looked at my backlinks and found two pages which just show the url and a 'Similar pages' link. As far as I know, these pages are not indexed so far. (Otherwise, one would see a snippet and a 'similar pages' link.) However, how can Google find a link on those pages if they are not indexed so far?

[ct2000]

....I just noticed I even have a PR2 page on my site that has 11 backlinks ..

[ct2000]

add to that a PR0 with 1 backlink - I kid you not!

[suggy]

I have enjoyed the same phenomenon (?) as CT2000. Backlinks increase, dramatically, PR goes down anyway.

Also seeing lots of low PR backlinks showing up. I'm not convinced that the PR cooked up in the last update was correct.

Perhaps we'll see a correction next update?

Here's hoping....

[takagi]

Prior to the Dominic update, the number of backlinks was always an even number. But you could never see more than 50% of them. So if it reported 32 links, you could see only up to 16. But those 16 all had a PR4+. So maybe the logic was: we count the PR4+ and double the number for those uncounted for.

Since the Dominic update the number is no longer automatically even, and if it shows 15, you might get to see them all. But recently the limit to show the links is also lowered (but in my feeling still existing).

GoogleGuy wrote at the start of the Esmeralda update:

The reported number of backlinks for now vs. 2-3 months ago were apples and oranges (that's why I counseled patience when people thought that their number of backlinks had dropped in Dominic), but now vs. Dominic is apples to apples. I'm just putting that out there for the experts who are really hard-core backlink watchers.

(Google June 2003 : Update Esmeralda [webmasterworld.com] msg. 15)

So it looks to me, this change in counting backlinks was done on purpose.

[PatrickDeese]

I've noticed, for the first time, links from blogs. And I am talking about old links - dated Dec. 2002 and one from April 2001 (PR 0 and PR 1, respectively).

Maybe google decided to stop giving ATW the "check all your backlinks" business.

;)