Which is better - A PR 5 page with 4 outbound links or a PR 6 with 40?

Trying to decide which directory page to ask for inclusion in

[brizad]

HI,

Didn't see this talked about before-

Any thoughts?

This is for one of the smaller directories. I'm trying to decide which category would be better for me based on the PR. Both directory pages would be relevant to my site.

I'm leaning towards the PR 5 page.

Thanks-

[diamondgrl]

The fact is you can't tell for sure. If it's a high 6 and a low 5, you probably should go with the high 6. If they are precisely 5 and precisely 6, probably not since speculation I've heard is that the log base is less than 10. But it all depends on what logarithmic scale Google uses and that is a factor held tightly at the Googleplex.

You can look in the Google DMOZ directory and see the toolbar rank. If your 6 and 5 are both in there, you can get a sense of whether they are higher or lower than their peers in the same PR. If the 6 is indeed the top of 5 or 6 other sites with PR 6, it probably is close to 7.

Just to complicate the discussion further, is it 4 links and 40 links? Or 4 outside links and 40 outside links, as I suspect? For the 4-links page, probably you really have a dozen or more internal links, bringing the true number to 16 or more. So 16 vs. 52 (40 + 12) is the real scale you should be looking at. There I personally would tip the scales toward going with the 6 without knowing more about the log scale.

[brizad]

That's a good point about the DMOZ diamondgrl. I didn't know that they ranked other directories. I checked and the directory is not listed at all. There are only 5 directories listed and 4 of them are owned by Yahoo!

To clarify, the PR 6 page has 40 outbound links and about 38 more going internally to deeper links in the category and some navigation links.

The PR 5 page has only the 4 outbound links and 14 internal links.

I guess like you said you have to get the slide rule out and try to decipher the PR that would be passed on from each page.

[diamondgrl]

I would say you very well might have a big difference in the true value between the two sites. But given the facts you have and the uncertainties that exist, you are probably as firm as you can get in the camp of "Who the heck knows?"

Had you said the number of internal links were the other way around - 4 + 38 = 42 for the PR5 and 40 + 14 = 54 for the PR 6 - you would have a likely (although given the uncertainties as to how strong a 5 and a 6 you had, not certain) winner. In this case, put your money on the PR 6.

As it stands, you can't say anything.

[martinibuster]

According to the Stanford Google research paper (Anatomy of Hypertextual Search Engine etc.), PageRank can be thought of as the likelihood that a random surfer clicking along links will come across your website. For example, the way in which PR drops the more clicks you get from the home page can be thought of as a reflection of the likelihood that this random surfer will become tired of your website and leave.

So one way of looking at it is how likely is it for that surfer to visit your site on a page with four outbounds as opposed to a page with forty?

Or, looked at another way: Have you ever checked your logs and been discouraged because the bots don't follow all your links, that they seem to become tired and leave, like a random surfer?

diamondgrl makes excellent points (as always).

I can probably make valid arguments for choosing one or the other. I say just grab them both because I don't think this question can be definitively answered.

[Robert Charlton]

So one way of looking at it is how likely is it for that surfer to visit your site on a page with four outbounds as opposed to a page with forty?

But the surfer isn't starting at either of these pages... so a further question you've got to ask yourself is how much more likely is the surfer to get to the PR6 page than to the PR5 page?

I'll let someone else more knowledgeable than I handle the nxn type discussions... but offhand I think I'd go with the PR6 too.

[brizad]

Just to clarify, both pages that I am referring to are on the same site/directory.

So one way of looking at it is how likely is it for that surfer to visit your site on a page with four outbounds as opposed to a page with forty?

That's a tough one. The directory layout is as such:
indexpage>> main category(PR6) >>subcategory (PR5)

More people will visit the PR 6 page but there are 4x more links to choose from so I would probably get clicked on less.

Less People would visit the PR 5 page but I would have a much better chance of getting clicked on since there are less links to choose from.

We're talking bots though and not humans, so they'll all get "clicked", it's just a question of how the PR gets divided.

Thanks for all the input.

[Lorel]

I would go for the PR 6 as the PR 5 will probably increase in links also and PR is figured logarithmically anyway (it takes 6 PR 5s to equal a PR 6)

there is a very good article on this theiry called "Google pagerank, & How to get it".