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And, you don't get to keep and count the PR that you have to pass to others; i.e., you don't get to vote for yourself.
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You do get to vote for yourself, but not through links themselves. More pages in your site will add
PR to your site. (but 10 pages more isn't going to make much diference. This difference is only noticable when comparing sites with few pages to sites with tens of thousands of pages.)
PR sculpting is possible with nofollow, (but it's a waste of time as far as I'm concerned.) I agree with the way Janeth describes how
PR works. Every page has a single
PR point (not toolbar
PR point but real
PR point) to start with (before calculating the distribution of
PR) and thus the total amount of
PR available in Google's index is at most the number of pages they have indexed. Then after an iterative process the distribution of
PR through links is determined.
So that answers the question: "But,
how is the initial value created?"
There is no "proof" needed to determine wether or not
PR sculpting with the nofollow works or not. It does work because if you deny a link to pass
PR then the distribution will be different. The more important question is whether or not this has any significant effect on positions and traffic to your website. In my opinion it has very little effect simply because
PR is just one of the many ranking factors and what's more important, the amount of
PR you can channel away from certain pages to other pages is so small that you´re talking about a change in real
PR of less than a %.
In case you have a really big site of tens of thousands of pages (which is actually what Greg Boser is talking about, Webnauts) then you can significantly sculpt
PR in the site. And I can imagine that in those specific cases it can have a positive effect on positions for some keywords. But I have to say that I suspect that there is also a negative effect on the number of keywords the site is found for which in turn means less traffic to the site. Which brings me back to my original point that using nofollow to sculpt
PR is a waste of time.