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I'm not quite sure I follow your logic here...
If on your home page, you have 3 links to internal pages, then the amount of "PR loss" is split 3 ways.
Could you try to re-phrase for me please?
I may be confused but my understanding is that (ignoring external factors) PR is passed around internal pages that are linked. If you have 3 links from the home page then PR will be transferred to each page equally. If a fourth link is introduced to the home page itself (e.g. in the navigator. Is the proportion passed on to these pages now reduced? i.e. is the link to the home page (from the home page) counted?
Thanks for response by the way
I have lots of sites where the homepage is a 7, and 20+ pages are 5, where the other 80 or so pages in the site have 0.
Internal linking is a VERY small factor in PR, if at all. Most links only count from outside your server.
I've had an internal page have a PR of 6 while the homepage was a 4. Just depends on where people link and where your content is.
I'd disagree with that, and contend that for the purposes of calculating PageRank it makes no matter whether the links come from your site, your server, or anywhere else. Google's own public technical documents make it clear that as it was originally developed PageRank is calculated for each page without regard to that page's placement within a site. I've seen no evidence that there's ever been a change in that.
>> I've had an internal page have a PR of 6 while the homepage was a 4. Just depends on where people link and where your content is.
How would that contradict the idea that internal links are contributing to the PageRank of both of those pages?
How would that contradict the idea that internal links are contributing to the PageRank of both of those pages?
Well, it does to me because none of the other pages linked to the PR6 page saw any gain.
calculated for each page without regard to that page's placement within a site
So, to me that means that if a page in the site gets a good PR from links or whatever, G doesn't care where it's located in the directory / site structure. It doesn’t say to me that PR will be shared with any other page linked to it. If that were the case, I'd expect to see a lot more consistency in PR throughout a site... a kind of leveling off effect of all the PR sharing going on in it.
Unfortunately, my test pages don't solve this problem so far. I have to wait for the next PR update ...
Hey, I wrote that sentence. It means exactly what I meant it to mean, and that's not it! ;)
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that there aren't elements in Google's ranking algorithms for which backlinks from external sources are counted and internal links are not; or for which only external backlinks matter at all. But the topic here is specifically PageRank. In calculating PageRank a page is a page is a page...
>> none of the other pages linked to the PR6 page saw any gain
Whether there was a change on the indicated PageRank as displayed on the toolbar is not the same thing as whether there was a significant change in PageRank -- especially at the higher end where the gap between the toolbar values is large.
By the way, there's some valuable insight into the workings of PageRank to be gained from the documents linked to in this thread [webmasterworld.com].
My tests suggest that the link to a page itself does benefit that page, so making three links to your interior pages and one to the index page would benefit the index page. In my opinion the jury is still out on it, but those links do show as backlinks, and there is no harm in it beyond possibly wasting a bit of PR.
It's hard enough trying to rank, without worrying about this minor, and incredibly complex, factor.
Whichever way it is done, if pages are sensibly and intuitively linked, you tend to end up with an average PR for your whole site, with the PR of the index page +1 over the other pages.
Just make your site navigable as you see fit.
I've lost a lot of sleep over Google and its antics, but never over this old sausage.
My tests suggest that the link to a page itself does benefit that page, so making three links to your interior pages and one to the index page would benefit the index page.
so how about duplicate links to the same page? do they count twice? if yes (just trying to make the point) than 200 links to the page itself would reduce "PR leak" of a few external links to virtually zero..
so how about duplicate links to the same page? do they count twice?
No.
My tests suggest that the link to a page itself does benefit that page ...
I hope that I'll confirm this (for PR) after the next update. In general there are (at least) three possible effects when adding a self link:
- it might change PR distribution
- it might be counted as incoming anchor text
- it change on-page factors due to the additional text (in a link)
Even if Google wouldn't count a self link as backlinks there is an effect due to the change of on-page factors.
Now which do you think is easier to achieve?
1. Build lots more content, and therefore benefit from lots more linkage.
or
2. Keep banging away with the link requests from external sites.
The answer is nether, sadly. They're both very difficult to achieve in a reasonable time period (the exception would be large organisations with large budgets)
PR or Page Rank is just that "Page Rank" and varies from page to page depending on the PR of the other pages linking to it whether they are external or internal.
I guess my whole confusion was the "transfer" thing. It's all so clear now, but not after a looooong day of work. Thanks for helping me understand the PR concept!
