pagerank and site hierarchy

hows it work

[azMacGyver]

say I have a domain: widgets-sale.com

my products main page is widgets-sale.com/products

my product category and product detail pages go in:
widgets-sale.com/products/categoryname/file.html

If I DMOZ and get some other PR4 and PR5 sites to link my main page: widgets-sale.com

How will (approximately) pagerank work for my products index page and the product category and detail pages? I currently show PR0 for my newly updated product index & newly created detail pages yet they were just crawled. I was hoping it would show the unranked status, should I be worried I was somehow PR0'd?

Lastly, would I benefit (in pagerank sense) from bypassing the /categoryname/ folder and just going: widgets-sale.com/categoryname/file.html

This is if what I think is true of pagerank (it filters out from the main page through directories.. lowering the PR each level) Any brief and quick clarification of anything assumed above is appreciated.

TIA!

-mac

[Spica]

PR propagation from your index page to other pages of your site is independent of your directory structure. It only depends upon the number of clicks necessary to go from one page to the other, with similar loss of PR for every click. Any page of your site that is linked directly from your front page will probably get a PR that is -1 as compared to the PR of your index page.

[vincevincevince]

Any page of your site that is linked directly from your front page will probably get a PR that is -1 as compared to the PR of your index page.

This used to be true, but now it seems not so - I designed one domain where I kept all pages linked directly from the front page and at the same directory level as the index.page - most pages are 2PR below now.

[doc_z]

This used to be true, but now it seems not so - I designed one domain where I kept all pages linked directly from the front page and at the same directory level as the index.page - most pages are 2PR below now.

Of course, it depends on the number of links on the page. If you have about 20 links on the page PR will drop by on. Thus if you have more links the drop is higher.

[killroy]

for me those pages have the same pr as the index. it's quite different and more complex. these simplified approximations aren'T going to do you any good and just mislead you. You really should read up on the PageRank whitepaper to fully comprehend it.

SN

[twilight47]

I've seen a drop of 1 for most pages off of the index page. A few pages have dropped 2. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but those that dropped 2 were also an extra level lower in hierarchy.