Forum Moderators: open
I generally understand page rank but I'm unclear about how pages more than level 1 deep get a ranking, if at all. I looked around at some colleagues' pages and they have the same issue as I do. Besides the fact I used to have a PR 6... Right now my level 0 page has a PR 4, level 1 has a PR 4, level 2 has PR 0, etc. The organization of the site is pretty much vertical. Traditional heirarchical tree kinda thing. I belive it's pretty theme-like even though I've only heard of themes lately. I'm in the middle of a redesign and adding beaucoup content and I want to know wassup before posting the new site. What am I missing? Is it a linking issue? Keyword Issue? Do I have my wires crossed?
>>I generally understand page rank?
page rank is a function of how many pages link to a given page either from within the same domain or from an external domain.
the weighting depends on the pr of the page that links to you, as you can see its a kind of cyclical thing.
there is nothing more to it, no other factors.
I don't think there's any great change in the algorithm. A page with e.g. PR 5 has the "PR power" to transfer e.g. 3 PR tokens to pages it links to. If there's one link off the page then that page gets all three PR tokens, perhaps giving it a PR of 3. If there are three links off the page then each page gets one PR token, perhaps giving each one a PR of 1.
The PR 3 page now has the "PR power" to transfer e.g. 2 PR tokens to pages it links to. If there's one link off the page then that page gets both PR tokens, perhaps giving it a PR of 1 or 2.
...and so it goes on. PR is thus diluted throughout the site. If you want to concentrate the PR of pages within your site on one particular page, e.g. your product sales page, then have every other page in your site linking to that page (thus donating PR tokens) and have each page linking to as few other pages as possible (thus donating as much of the PR token quota for that page to the one you want).
Caveat: the figures and proportions suggested in this post are not designed to bear any particular relevance to the actual figures. In particular, there are many discussions on how much PR a particular page can transfer (in my example, 3 PR tokens from a PR 5 page). Incoming links to the site homepage increase the total number of PR tokens that the homepage can transfer to subpages.
Also note the common misconception about PR leak - a PR 5 page loses nothing by linking to other pages, so if you put ten links on a PR 5 page, its PR does not drop. However, if that page has 3 PR tokens to distribute to other pages, you're "recycling" your PR tokens if you link within your site and "donating" your PR tokens if you link to sites elsewhere. Recycling can be good to maintain high PR throughout the site, donating can be good to get Google to consider your site as an authority.
:)
Thank you John_Caius! I definatly had my wires crossed. Maybe that's what you get by reading too many forums. Har, Har... The idea of recycling and donating is what I was not fitting in with the rest of it.
