How much PR can one generate internally?

By internally I mean within your own network.

[HeyJim]

I didn't think you could really generate your own PR but I came across something that really confuses me. (Not too difficult to do in the morning, by the way.)

I came across a very interesting spamming page occupying the #1 postion for a pretty competitive phrase. It uses a redirect to a PR6 page on its own domain. I started following backlinks and with one exception, a link to another domain with a PR4, all of the links *seem* to be from one subdomain to another subdomain. A whole bunch of subdomains crosslinked.

I followed a lot of links/backlinks and, with the one exception noted above, can find no other sites feeding this network.

My question: If I had enough time and inclination to trace out all of these backlinks would I find additional sites outside of the network feeding it PR that it then distributes very effectively or it is possible that the PR4 coming from just one external (to the network) site can be boosted to a PR6 following this linking method?

[SlyOldDog]

Each page in Google's index has some pagerank. If google indexed thousands of pages from this site, it could generate its own pagerank - though it's easier to just get 1 link from an external site :)

[BigDave]

Without external links, it is very difficult to get enough pages crawled to be able to generate a sufficient amout to make a real difference.

[andrew_m]

SlyOldDog -- you're right, but what if that "internal" network is comparable in size to the whole internet?

Not that realistic scenario, but just to point out that the value of the link does depend on the size of the "sub-graph" it links to.

[steveb]

If you are following backlinks using Google, that is worthless. As of now, typically you won't be shown the most important/highish PR links to pages.

The task can still be done but you have to use Yahoo backlinks and work a lot harder than before.

[HeyJim]

Steveb: I completely forgot that essential piece of information; that only the lower PR backlinks are being shown now.

There, I believe, is my answer. This person likely does have more high PR external links coming in then Google's backlinks are ever going to show.

I just have to look elsewhere to see what other sites are giving this site PR. Just very curious.

Thanks everyone for direction.

[metatarsal]

I wonder why Google still shows backlinks? - they're heavily edited and what's shown can easily be demonstrated to not be the most important ones.

But PR (as given by the toolbar) remains a puzzle, cos it still lokks accurate (as long as you add in the 'missing' backlinks.)

[johney]

So how do you find these 'missing' backlinks?

-- John

[webdude]

Go to yahoo and do the link:www.widget.com

You will find all the backlinks there.

[Stefan]

I believe that for Y the backlink command is:

link:http://www.example.org

You need the http:// on the front or else it just shows you text occurences of the URL.

[Hagstrom]

Yahoo also has a "linkdomain" command - making the task much easier: linkdomain:www.sitename.com

[the_nerd]

I wonder why Google still shows backlinks? - they're heavily edited and what's shown can easily be demonstrated to not be the most important ones.

because many people still use some time looking at them - time they can't use to spam the index.

[Collieman]

One of our sites achieved a PR of 3 with only internal links plus 1 low value external link.

As soon as we started link building the PR went to 4...

In theory each internal page has a PR of 1...so to make the index page better you must have a linking structure which moves the PR from internal pages onto the index page

[HeyJim]

I'm still unsure of how effective this is at bumping PR internally but on small sites I usually link virtually all of the internal pages to the index and to one another.

Last year it *seemed* to bump up the PR a couple of notches on some internal pages that had long been stuck at one level. Of course, this was just one site and there's always so many external variables that it didn't prove anything. I just like the logic behind it for now and hope that it's not faulty logic.

[owlcroft]

An excellent guide for the perplexed can be found at:

www.****.net/pagerank.html

Each page in a web site--like each page on the web, period--has a certain nominal amount of Page Rank merely for existing. (But it must have at least one inbound link from somewhere, else it's invisible to searchbots.) A web site may thus be said to have a cumulative "site PR", which is something other than the rank of its front page. How that cumulative rank is distributed among the various pages of the site is quite under the control of the careful webmaster by way of internal linkage.

If, as some do and some don't, one wants to concentrate as much of the site's cumulative PR in the site front page, then one makes sure that every page in the site (except that front page) links to the front page and _only_ to the front page. The front page itself links either to each of the other pages, or to a site directory (which links to every other page on the site).

That is purposeful but not always practical: consideration for the site visitor will frequently mandate other intra-site links. The answer, in this scenario, is to provide those links but hide them using a simple link hider. Webmasters often think of link hiding, when they think of it at all, as a way to stop "PR bleed" to external sites--but it can make excellent sense, depending on one's priorities, for internal links.

("PR bleed" does, despite ignorant nay-saying, exist. It is not a "bleeding" of PR from the page giving the external link--it is simply that by giving away some value through the external link, that page has that much the less to give back to other pages on the site. The linking page itself is unaffected, but the net PR of the site as a whole drops some little bit.)