PR Penalty for Too Many Links?

Does Google give PR penalties for too many links?

[hiker_jjw]

Just curious if anyone has seen any strange or unusual PR values for child pages to parent pages with "too" many links? After this past update, many of my PR 3 pages suddenly dropped to PR 1. No PR 2 results at all, which makes me believe that something strange is going on. It's either 3 or 1, but no 2's. The parent pages have remained at PR 4.

Here's the situation. I've got several index pages, A-Z (the parent pages). Each index page has several links on it. In some cases, up to 200+ links. This is not spam, it's actually useful to visitors.

I've noticed that if a parent page (PR 4) has more than approximately 175 links on it, then all the child pages get a PR 1. If it has less than approx. 175 links on it, then the child pages get a PR 3. There are no PR 2's to be found.

It's almost like Google is figuring that the page is a link farm, therefor no PR is transfered to the child pages. Anyone want to comment on this? Is there anything I can do for the PR 1 pages?

Thanks.

[rogerd]

Interesting observation, hiker. You could split the bigger parent pages, I suppose, to see if that cures the problem of PR1 pages. I assume all the pages have been indexed for a while so you aren't working with estimates on some and actual on others...

[hiker_jjw]

These are not new pages, they've been around for several months. I guess this is more of a warning than a question. I'm going to need to split up the pages better to prevent this problem.

[ken_b]

I believe I've seen mention here at WW about limiting links per page to 100 for Google.

I do know that I split off a section of a page that had 100+ plus links and gave that section it's own page.

For wahatever reason, perhaps because the relocated content is now on a more focused page, the new page now performs at least as well as the old page did, and most often significantly better as far as search reults and page views.

[Marcia]

Google suggests in their webmaster guidelines that there be no more than 100 links on a page. Even that's too liberal for some people's taste.

The value of the Page Rank passed on to linked pages is increasingly diluted as the number of links increases on the parent page.

[hiker_jjw]

For wahatever reason, perhaps because the relocated content is now on a more focused page, the new page now performs at least as well as the old page did, and most often significantly better as far as search reults and page views.

I imagine the added performance is due to what some people refer to as the freshness factor. New pages often get a small PR boost for the first month, according to some of the emails posted here. I've witnessed this with new pages.

The value of the Page Rank passed on to linked pages is increasingly diluted as the number of links increases on the parent page.

I realize that. But, how do you explain the missing PR 2's that you would expect to see? It's either PR 3 or PR 1 on the child pages.

[egomaniac]

hiker_jjw, could this be simply a case of uneven PageRank across your PR4 pages? Just in case you aren't aware, the toolbar PR number is just an approximation. The true PR scale that Google uses is much more granular than the 1-10 digit integer scale that we see on our toolbars.

For example, perhaps one of your pages has a real value of PR 4.9712 and another page has a real value of PR 4.1358. Both would read as PR 4 on the toolbar. But the page with the PR value of 4.9712 has has about 5-6 times more PageRank than the page with a value of 4.1358. Why? Because the PR scale is logarithmic, with a log base guessed to be around 6.

Since the higher PR 4 page has much more PR to distribute downline, this could explain why some pages are getting a PR 3, while child pages off of another PR 4 page are getting a PR of 1.

The only way you could rule out the above scenario with certainty was if each PR 4 page had exactly the same number of incoming links from exactly the same source pages. Otherwise you have know way of knowing what the "true" PR value of your PR 4 pages are just using the toolbar number.

To ask it another way, could your observation be mere coincidence?
-egomaniac

[hiker_jjw]

To ask it another way, could your observation be mere coincidence?
-egomaniac

It's not coincidence, but it could be that I'm seeing the rough estimate of PR on the toolbar. Time to redesign.