Too high PR for websites on Geocities?

[troels nybo nielsen]

Before I got my own domains I had my websites spread all over the web. I also had a site with Geocities. I still have it, but I do not use it for much else than linking to my domains. I was very surprised to see that my couple of pages on Geocities have PR6 and PR5. Of course I am not complaining, but frankly they are not worth it. I would estimate that PR3 and PR2 would be more fair.

Can it really be true that an obscure website with very few visitors gets a good PR just for being placed on Geocities?

[djgreg]

What you see at geocities is not the real PR. It is only an estimated PR which Google takes , because Geocities has a PR8 and the folders under the start page automatically get PR8 - 1 or 2. SO this is no evidence of a high PR.

[mack]

Do geocities sites ever echeive true Page rank?

[djgreg]

Of course they receive real pagerank from the moment on when google found a site on which a link is pointing to the geocities site. The site which links to geocities site has PR 4 so the Geocities site will receive PR3.

[steveb]

Geocities sites can easily achieve real page rank. One DMOZ link will do it. If you look at the back links and there are none, then it is phantom page rank. If there are backlinks, then it is real.

[troels nybo nielsen]

I have linked back to my geocities site now, so I guess it wil have a real and realistic PR at the next dance. I just visited another geocities site and it had a PR2.

Thanks for your comments.

[fathom]

steveb nailed this!

A search in DMOZ finds 10,000 backlinks, add that to Google Directory, and many other directories which use DMOZ RDF, a few half way descent DMOZ clones, and that is alot of "not so real PageRank".

Well just a wee bit more than we'll ever get anyway! ;)