The Real Google Pagerank

Finding exact PageRank; PR= 7.2316 instead of PR=7

[DesignExplosion]

When trying to increase your PageRank, it can get tiresome checking your Pagerank for months and months waiting for it to move up a point.

The only other thing that I've thought of over the years, is non-alphabetical, and seemingly "random" way that google lists each website within a category in the Google Directory.

It is very well known that Google uses DMOZ for all of its *Directory* listings; so every category you see in DMOZ, is organized in the exact same way as the Google Directory. Every website listed in DMOZ, is also in Google's.

But there is one glaring difference, DMOZ is listed in a standard alphabetical format & Google isnt... plus the fact that each pages' PAGERANK is displayed next to each listing.

These listing are grouped into each integer value,
ex. All websites with a PR of 7 will all listed at the top, then all the PR6 sites-->PR5-->PR4....

So lets say my site had a Pagerank of 6, and there are 100 websites in that category with a PR6. I've found it to be pretty reliable that as your website's popularity increases... so does its placement in the Directory.

Would it be safe to say then that if I were only analyzing those 100(~99) websites that are in the same category as me, with the same pagerank, that you could actually accurately judge your pagerank by how high/low your site appears within its category/rank?

Every experiment that I have conducted to test this, came out verifying that you can watch just how close your website is to the next level... PR6-->PR7.

If you don't completely agree with me here, what are some other factors that you think would play a role here?

I've played around with these sorts of experiments on rankings, some of which have become very complex, so I'd love to hear all of your ideas on this subject of understanding what makes the system tick.

This is my first post here, so I look forward to gaining as much insight as possible in my time at WebmasterWorld!

Thanks again,
Bryant Smith

*I posted this in SEP first... I didnt see that you guys have forum made especially for Google* :)

[dazzlindonna]

I dont see how you could guesstimate just by looking at the google directory. Let's say there are 5 PR6 sites listed in the category. Even if we assume that those 5 sites are listed from high to low PR, they could still be something like:

6.999
6.998
6.997
6.996
6.1

If your site is the third one in the list, you might would assume it was a 6.5 (being right smack in the middle), but you would have been wrong. Sorry, but I don't think there's any way to determine it.

[BigDave]

In addition to what dazzindonna said, it is best to remember that google can (and does) change the base of their toolbar pagerank as compared to their real pagerank.

I think it is much more accurate to watch the secondary and tertiary pages increase in pagerank to help you find out when a jump on your home page is getting closer. If your home page is PR6 and some of your pages that are one level deep jump up to PR6 from PR5, it is a sign that you are probably going to make it up to PR7 sometime soon.

I personally only check PR regularly on new sites. On older sites I only check about 4 times a year. "Knowing your toolbar PR" just isn't that important, it is more of an ego thing than useful information.

What is useful with looking at your google directory ranking is that you will know ere you sit in comparison to your competitors.

[SlowMove]

In the real world, people search for things like buy some green and yellow widgets, and pages with PR0 or PR1 show up in the SERPS. If a site with only a few PR4+ pages has a lot of these pages spidered, it can get some good traffic. I'd like to know how G determines how many pages get indexed on say a PR6 or PR7 site.

[sblake]

There's something to this, I think--

Someone posted a pretty detailed analysis along these lines here about a year or two ago-- I can't find it now. But it seemed to have some merit.

The interesting thing that seemed to provide a bit more information was that in the G Directory, when sorted by PageRank, the PageRank display shown for each listing is actually two graphics-- one for the green part of the toolbar and one for the grey. They add up to 40 pixels-- 27 and 13 pixels, or 22 and 18pixels, or 16 and 14 pixels, and so on.

The other poster noted that, for example, listed pages that carried a G toolbar ranking of 6 were divided into those that showed a Directory toolbar graphic of 27/13 pixels (which he designated 'high 6' or some such) and those that showed a Directory graphic of 22/18 pixels (low 6). Similarly, pages that carried a toolbar ranking of 5 were divided between those that carried a Directory graphic of 22/18 (high 5)-- the same graphic used for the low 6 pagerank pages, and those that showed a 16/14 graphic (low 5). And so on, and so on....

It was a pretty interesting analysis-- along the lines of what you're suggesting, and it carried it out much further mathematically, with consideraton of the logarithmic scale and whatnot.

[Getit]

One of the pages from our site has a PR4 in the Google directory while having a PR6 on the Google toolbar?

Does this mean the Google Directory uses a different PR calculation? Or is the Directory just not current?

[abates]

The directory is not updated very often, no...