Why Might a Sitemap not Pass PageRank?

[tonyww]

Hi
I have a Site Map with PR4. It links to 13 pages. All the pages it links to are PR3 except one page which has zero PR!

Any ideas why, anyone?

There doesn't appear to be any inconsistencies between how the pages are linked, the tags etc etc.

[annej]

I'm beginning to suspect that the more links you have on a page the less PR they pass on. I have a PR6 on all my second level pages which are primarily content pages listing links to the articles in subsections. I find that they consistently pass on a PR 5 to the articles except for the one content page that has a great many links. I'm thinking of dividing that page up into 3 content pages to see if that helps.

I'm also wondering if it has anything to do with how many links the final page has. I'm about ready to try an experiment on that. It seems to me that the pages linked to from the PR6 page that have only a PR 4 may have too many outbound links on them. Does you PR0 page have more outgoing links than the others?

I do need to ask if the PR0 page is relatively new. It used to be that PR was updated instantly when I added a new article but now it takes a while.

[edited by: annej at 4:00 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2004]

[Iguana]

Don't trust the Toolbar Pagerank at the moment. I added a new link to an internal page in my site header and it has only a PR2 displayed - rather than the PR5 or PR4 from the other pages in the header.

(or maybe the Toolbar is correct and Google give different PR to pages dependent on when you created them)

[Rollo]

I'm beginning to suspect that the more links you have on a page the less PR they pass on.

In the link building section here on Webmaster World, everyone seems to be in agreement that this is the case for outbound links, but I'm not sure it's the case with internal links at all.

Google's only caveat is to make sure a page has less then 100 links.

[annej]

but I'm not sure it's the case with internal links at all

Mine are pretty much all internal links. But I still wonder if Google differentiates between internal and external. It seems logical that they would but in observing it isn't that obvious that it does.

different PR to pages dependent on when you created them

I find it just takes a while to get PR on a new page now but once I do it seems to be at par with similar pages.

I wonder if it is something else. I notice that my homepage seems to have passed on the PR7 to one page. It is a page with a good deal of text and few links. I wonder if that is the reason. Meanwhile the homepage seems to pass on a PR6 to all other pages it links to except to the first page of my directory which only gets a 4. That page is mostly links, several to other internal directory pages.

So on my VERY limited study links, even internal links, seems to be a factor

[badtzmaru]

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I'm beginning to suspect that the more links you have on a page the less PR they pass on.
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I thought that this was always that case, that in it's simplest form PR was essentially a ratio of incoming to outgoing links.

[billygg]

i definitely agree with that, more links outbound, regardless if they are internal or external, will dilute the PR passed.

[annej]

But I'm going one step further and suggesting a page with too many outgoing links might hurt that page's PR.

I also agree that a page with too many links will pass on less PR.

[Patrick Taylor]

Really, using a Google PageRank calculator will often give you very surprising results - for the "raw PR" of your pages, that is. It is a straight calculation (no matter what your pages are called - site map, links, whatever, makes no difference) but can quickly become very complex. The raw PR is not the same as the PR displayed by the green bar but will give an indication of the effect of link structures and which can be roughly transposed into the real world. Simply looking at the PR of your pages and surmising about your link structures is not a very reliable way to come to firm conclusions unless you're familiar with the formula and you have a superfast mathematical brain (I'm not and I haven't).

If anyone is interested to see a Google PageRank calculator I can sticky the URL, or search Google for "PageRank calculator".