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Chicken or Egg?

A pagerank question...

         

menyak

8:01 am on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have a link page with a PR that's one level lower than it should be according to site structure, PR inheritance, etc. This page links to a link form that has a PR 0. The link form is a normal page on my site, and the only incoming link is from my link page. (And yes, both PRs are "real" as far as I know.)

I've been racking my brain for some time now why my link form has a PR0. I never found an answer, but at least I was sure that my link page has a slightly lower PR because it links to a PR0 page.

Is it possible that I have been mistaking the chicken for the egg? Maybe the lower rank on my links page is due to a couple of links to "bad" sites (of course that's possible). And (that's my question) the link form has a PR0 because the only page that is linking to it has a penalty on it?

vitaplease

8:10 am on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



How many links on the links page?
What Pagerank does the links page have?

menyak

8:27 am on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Appr. 200 links are on the page, it's a PR4 (when it should be PR5).

I know that Google indicates that the ideal number of links on a page is 100 or lower, but it shouldn't be a page rank issue as far as I know (?).

vitaplease

8:46 am on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Is this linkform page the only page with a PR0.
(the other pages that are linked from the linkpage have higher Pagerank?)

benihana

8:57 am on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I didnt think number of links affected pr until recently, but would like to refer you to my post from yesterday:

[webmasterworld.com...]

as far as i can tell the number of links is dramatically damaging my pr, as i have yet to find another explaination.

hope this helps.

menyak

9:17 am on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



vp: Well, there are maybe 15 links to other pages, but those are menu links (meaning that each and every page on my domain links to those pages), so if there's a damage it's not to be noticed.

bh: I've considered that one as well, but actually I can't believe it. There are a lot of pages out there that have tons of links on them, and some of them are very useful resources (bad layout, but who cares?). These sites do very well, and there's no sign that Google grudges them for the number of links they have. I've noticed the problem you mention only with site maps, and on most occasions there are REALLY many links (>1,000 like in your case) and the page only consists of URLs with no additional text or information.

vitaplease

10:04 am on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The link form page,

are you sure its not linking out to linkfarm pages (other PRO pages)?

menyak

10:26 am on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'm trying to check my outgoing links on a regular basis, and if sites go bad, I delete the link.

Entirely possible that I missed something a couple of months ago, and Google didn't take it kindly. Anyway, that wasn't my question. Essentially I wanted to know if a PR4 page can "pass on" a PR0 to another page. There's nothing bad on that link form page, no outgoing links etc., and in fact I use basically the same page on a different site of mine where Google likes it.

krbulldog

1:44 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



i guess 100 links per page is the max. otherwise google consider it as spam.

vitaplease

1:58 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



krbulldog,

100 is just a guideline:

Google itself use more on their sitemap

[webmasterworld.com...]

Grumpus

2:11 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I was under the impression that google just isn't going to follow anything after the 100th link on a page. I could be wrong. I never got the impression that more than 100 could be spam or penalized in any way other than the fact that the end of the page was pretty much useless.

Was looking at my homepage last month and there was about 160 links on it (who knew?). I pared it down quite a bit, just because of the fact that I was wasting links. I don't think that page ever got penalized, though. It's PR was (and is) just about where I thought it deserved to be. I was just wondering why stuff at the end of my page didn't get the PR I thought it should.

<shrug> Who knows.

Now, for the question - if you only have one page on the web linking to your "form page" and the page that links to it has 200 links on it, then it is likely to get a PR 0 as very little PR is passed along to it. Split that page up into 4 pages (or even 8 pages) and you'll also be passing along more benefit to the sites you're trading links to (and you'll have 4 or 8 links to your form page).

G.

krbulldog

2:18 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



tnx vitaplease....

What will happen when i do the following thing:

I make a page with about 1000-2500 links futher no text, only links and then submit this site

like this:

x (www.example.com)
x (www.example.com/00001.htm)
x (www.example.com/00002.htm)
Etc.
where x is the hyperlink...

menyak

3:01 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Na, don't forget that page rank is passed on quite differently within the same domain. A page linked to a PR4 should be at least PR3, no matter how many links. Also it wouldn't explain why my link page itself has a lower PR than it should.

vitaplease

3:50 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



don't forget that page rank is passed on quite differently within the same domain

menyak,

thats quite a claim to make, can you elaborate?

>>A page linked to a PR4 should be at least PR3, no matter how many links

A page linked from a PR4 page, (receiving no other links) can be - depending on the amount of links - anything from a PR0 to a PR4 in my view.

krbulldog,

1000-2500 links on a PR4 page would probably lead to PR0 on the receiving end.

jomaxx

4:21 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



1. Google definitely follows well over 100 links on a page. If there is some cutoff other than the standard 101K page size limit, I have never seen it reported. Pagerank also appears to flow normally from pages with up to 150-200 links. Haven't tested beyond that.

2. Menyak, there's no way you can know exactly what rank a page should have, unless you have set up a test site with a very simple and controlled linking structure. A discrepancy of one digit is well within the margin of error, and there's no need to hypothesize that the page is being penalized for any reason.

ciml

6:56 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



> Pagerank also appears to flow normally from pages with up to 150-200 links

Interesting, there's a major dampener (huge if we're talking rar PR) at some point. I know it's less than about 250-260 links, so if we agree with each other then we've narrowed it to between 150 and 260?

menyak

7:09 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Ciml, do you agree that pagerank is passed on the same way no matter if a page is part of the same domain or not?

BigDave

9:35 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Depending on how good of a PR4 the page is, the log base of the toolbar PR, the damping factor, and any penalty for too many links on the page, a PR0 would be just about right.

With a base of 6, a damping factor of .85, a low PR4 would give a high PR0 with 210 links. That doesn't count any penalties for too many links that might come into play.

JayC

10:03 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Ciml, do you agree that pagerank is passed on the same way no matter if a page is part of the same domain or not?

Personally, I've neither seen nor heard of any evidence that whether links are within the same domain makes any difference in Google's PageRank calculation. Certainly it doesn't as PR is described in Brin and Page's original documentation of it in the paper from Stanford.

jomaxx

10:41 pm on Feb 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>> Pagerank also appears to flow normally from pages with up to 150-200 links

I haven't done controlled testing like ciml has, just spot checks to make sure PR is flowing properly. Just to clarify, there could be a reduction of say 1 PR point starting somewhere under 150 links that would be hard to pick up via ad hoc testing, but I haven't noticed a major dropoff.

menyak

11:07 am on Feb 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Ok, ok, the message is slowly getting through. Wow, looks like I might be learning something in my old age. ;)

The funny thing is that in a different forum I used to frequent I read numerous posts stating that within a domain, PR is basically passed on according to your linking structure. In other words, all pages you can directly reach from your main page have a PR that's 0.9 points less, two clicks means -1.8, etc. (This of course if no external links are pointing to one of the sub-pages.) And up till now, this has been working for me, I have four websites and all of them are following this "rule" pretty closely.

But what you guys have told me would finally explain my PR4 and my PR0 page, which I was trying so hard to understand. And no penalties involved - hey, I like it. :)

Just one question: my main pages have hundreds of external links pointing to them, plus the internal links. The sub pages ONLY have the internal links pointing to them, yet they have a PR that's lagging less than a single point behind. That's a pretty high ranking, me thinks. Wouldn't it suggest that it's at least EASIER for internal pages to catch up on some PR?

ciml

4:22 pm on Feb 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



menyak, yes PageRank is passed on according to link structure, apart from the deviation for pages with many links (and some penalised URLs. PR seems to flow exactly the same within a domain or between domains (as of last month's index anyway). It's just the link text weight that's different.

> ...In other words, all pages you can directly reach from your main page have a PR that's 0.9 points less, two clicks means -1.8, etc. (This of course if no external links are pointing to one of the sub-pages.)

The flow also depends on the number of links, that's aside from the extra decrease past some threshold.

jomaxx makes a good point, small weighting factors are hard to pick up. I should explain what I meant here:

> "...there's a major dampener (huge if we're talking rar PR)..."
(that should be "raw PR", not "rar PR")

For the case of 250-ish links that I mentioned earlier, I get a PR drop of about 3.3 Toolbar notches where I would have expected (from the sub-100 trend) a drop of about 1.7 notches. That difference of 1.5 on the Toolbar scale is more than a 99% drop in raw PR according to my figures (though only a 93% drop based on the majority figure for the effective log base, 6).

menyak, I think that your last question is to do with feedback loops or parent pages with relatively few links. There was a craze for wildly overestimating the effects of PageRank feedback; there is an affect but it's small when you're looking at it through the Toolbar scale.

jomaxx

4:43 pm on Feb 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



ciml, just to clarify what you have been finding, are you saying that further links down the page are receiving less PR than expected?

Or that ALL links are receiving less PR than expected and that pagerank may therefore be evaporating away from the site? I don't think that's what you're describing, but it be a huge concern for me if true.

menyak

5:19 pm on Feb 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Ciml, that's all very interesting. You have mentioned one thing I was always curious about, and you seem to have at least a theory about it: what's the difference between the different pagerank notches? It's obviously arithmetic in some way, but how much is it? Is PR 7 three times as much as PR 6? Or ten times? Is there a rule of the thumb?

ciml

5:41 pm on Feb 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I feel a whole bunch of disclaimers coming soon...

jomaxx I'm saying that the position in the page makes no difference IMO (though other people believe differently). I'm also saying that ALL links are receiving less PR than expected and that pagerank is evaporating. What I see could be something like "if >nnn links then PR given out = PR given out -1.5 on the Toolbar", or "if >nnn links then raw PR given out = raw PR given out / 100".

menyak:
> ...what's the difference between the different pagerank notches?

Some people say six times, some say ten times, I say more and someone seemed to think it was about three.

The question then, is who to believe?