The truth about page rank

[janeth]

OK,
Here is my question and my understanding of page rank. The page rank is divided by the number of out going links on that page. So if you have a page rank of 6 with 2 out going links it would count as a three to those pages. If this is true then it would be better to be linked to a site with a page rank of 5 with 5 out going links then a site with a page rank of 7 with 20 out going links.
So actually if you want to get the most out of your links you need to find sites with a five or more with no more the three or four out going links on that page.
But would it not be easer to find a lot of good websites and link to them and not worry about page rank. I also herd that Google only counts sites with page ranks of 4 or higher. But then I started at zero and mine has gone up so should you give up a link just because the page is not ranked where you want it to be today.
What does it take to have a page ranking of 5?
How much of my information is true?

[OSFan]

What your saying looks right, and makes sense.

If there is a site with a pagerank of 10, and it only links to you, this means your site is going to be pretty good, and you're going to get a huge addition to your pagerank.

If there is a site with a pagerank of 10, and it links to 1000 people, we know this is some kind of directory, and so its linking to many, so small addition to your pagerank, it doesn't make your webpage look any better in the view of rank, it's not like you was specially selected.

A lesson from this is perhaps to link to too many people from your homepage, when you have a rank of about 3 is not going to help those sites really. Carefully select who you link to. You can not always choose incoming links, but no matter what rank and numbers of links on an incoming link, it always adds up, wether its 0.00001 or 1, there are no negatives.

[janeth]

Hi OSFan,
What determines how high your page ranking is. Is this also determined by incoming links.

[OSFan]

pagerank is based on the incoming links to your website, both their own rank, the number of links they link out to, the pages within their own site linked to from the page, and the whole internet linking system as a whole.

Maybe a website of pagerank 10 links to you now, you're the only one, you'd expect to rise. But if somewhere else on the next, 1000 pagerank 10 pages, each link to one other site on the net, the whole pageranking system as a whole is going to shuffle, and you'd probably be down, hence why pagerank always changes.

I would say pagerank maybe is midleading, it has nothing at all to do with the quality or the content of the page, like you would rank something usually based on its content. It's purely based on calculations of links, using a formula known only to them.

There is no real way to edit your pagerank, you have no control over incoming links, you cannot stop people linking to you. With stats systems, you can self improve them by continually refreshing pages, even Alexa can be messed with in a similar fashion, using tools or your brains to increase the traffic ranking.

I pick links carefully, and prefer not to be linked from pages which do things like "top 500 help sites" because they are actually doing me barely any good, and they always send traffic that don't need my services.

[janeth]

Hi OSFan,
I understand what your saying. But i have seen some sites that rank 5 when they have very few sites linking to them. Then I have seen sites with 10,000 links and be a number 6. How many points do you need to move up in your page ranking?

[OSFan]

My site as in my signature usually ranks at 4 or 5 and doesn't have a great deal of incoming links.

Like I said, it's not 1 link in = 1point. As it depends on the rank of the page linking in.

My site linking to yours may give you 1point, webproworld linking to yours may give you 0.5points, and a huge listing of sites with yours on it, may be 0.01 points. Hence you can't say 5 sites linking in will increase your pagerank by 1.

The 10 000(no comma!) pages linking to X site may all have 100s of links on their pages, and be of rank 1, hence they have little affect on you. The 20 pages linking to Y site may all have 2 links out, and be of page rank , being a greater vote to your site.

[Mel]

Hi Janeth:
you have to understand that first of all the PageRank you are seeing on the toolbar is NOT the PageRank that Google calculates for your page, but a handy dandy graphic representation, by way of a bunch of boxes labeled 1 thru 10.

Just to complicate it a bit these boxes are not evenly spaced, but appear to be a logrithmic scale so that the higher the box number the more links it takes to make the change to the next box. This also means that the real difference between a High PR 5 page and a low PR6 page might not be much at all, but the difference between an Low PR5 page and a high PR6 culd be quite a lot.

As an example suppose that the highest PageRank was in the range of 5 billion, then the PR 10 box might represent values from 1 to 5 billion, but the PR 4 box might only represent values of perhaps 80,000 to 100,000.

To take it a step further you have remember that the actual pagerank transferred to your page is reduced by a damping factor (maybe 15%) and the total PR of the page is divided by the total number of outbound links on the page so that if there are 50 outbound links you would get 1/50 of the amount you would get if there were only one link out.

And after you figure all this out, remember that this is not the most important factor if Google rankings.

[janeth]

Hi Mel,
Can I find out rather I have a low 5 or high 5?
What I was trying to find out for was not really for the purpose of linking to other sites but trying to figure out how to go from a 5 to a 7 or 8 with my own site.

[Mel]

Hi Janeth;

Sorry but Google does not make that information available to us peons. What you can often do however is watch your PR fluctuations (if any) during the updates. A High end PR4 may show temporarily as a 5 and then drop back, while a low PR may do the opposite.

You can get some idea of what it takes to move from a 5 to a 6 and from a 6 to a 7 by estimating that it will take 5 times more linking to got from a 5 to a 6 as it did to go from a 4 to a 5 and 6 times more linking to go from a 6 to a 7 than it does to go from 5 to a 6.

So as a rough measure of what it will take to move your site from a 5 to a 7 you can estimate that it will take about 30 times more linking than it did to got from 4 to 5. If it took you 50 links to go from 4 to 5, then look at 1500 similiar links to go from 5 to 7.

But remember, this is all guesstimation and the numbor of outbound links and the PR of the site have lots to do with it, If you could get a single link from a PR8 page with no other outbound links on it that might move you up to a PR7, but such links are nearly impossible to find and those who have them are normally quite aware of their value.

[janeth]

Hi Mel,
Thanks a lot. I guess the easiest way for me to do this would be to wait for you to get a pr8 and then give me a link.

[LateNight]

Try to purchase some "advertising" anchors on pages with high PR and few outbound anchors. There are lots of obscure websites out there with 6 and above PR. Many of the owners have no idea about PR and are more than happy to sell you some affordable advertising. Aim for some anchors on PR7s and see what happens to your PageRank.

[Johann]

Try to go to http://webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php3 and play with this. It will help you understand the page ranking concept. You have to be aware of your internal linking strategy as well as external linking.

[lupole]

I hear what you are all saying. I have many links comming and going to my site. I have a ranking of 1 on yahoo and google with key words "Soft rock cd". only some of my exit links are on my index page but most of my out going links are on category pages, keeping my outgoing links per page to a minimal.

[simonm]

Hi Janeth

Page ranking is (appears to be) also determined by the type of web site, business or private and many other factors, not just the quantity and quality of backward links.

I constantly review my page ranking, eg www.midkentwater is ranked as 5. It has 160 incoming links to the home page, yours has 36 and also ranks 5. Some of my links are web pages, some of course from the same site, some are from other sites but with the same IP number, and a further variation of IP's domain names, PRs etc.

As to the usefulness of backward links and search engine positioning, the context of the link is also relevant. As an example, a link to a page where the name of the link is "nutritional analysis", enough of those links and the page will be at the top of the search list for that term regardless of whether it exists within the page.

Try a search on "Nutritional analysis" on Google, look at the cached version. see the comment "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: nutritional "

Also look at the results of a search on "www.geeksonsteroids.com" (use that as the search term, I expect you do already) see how you rank on your category - that's where I got the number of backward links (also from the google toolbar of course) but also see the number of pages that 'contain the term' you have 209 which also helps PR.

A great tool for looking at backward links, but is temporarily offline is VisIT - see: http://www.visit.uiuc.edu/ but can be seen in action on this page - http://www.operatingthetan.com/google/

Good luck

[Black Knight]

Originally Posted by simonm

Page ranking is (appears to be) also determined by the type of web site, business or private and many other factors, not just the quantity and quality of backward links.

Only indirectly, Simon. The type of website you have will determine which categories of directories you get listed in (not all DMOZ or Yahoo categories have the same PageRank value for instance, and some have a lot more outbound links to divide their PageRank among than others too). It will also determine the other types of sites that are likely to link to you, and how willingly.

PageRank is a mathematical algorithm that calculates the relative number of citations, both direct and indirect, that any page on the web has. It includes internal links (pages from your own site) because PR works on a page by page basis, not a site basis.

[simonm]

Black Knight

I suppose we are both right! Janeth's dmoz category has a page rank of about 8, mine has a rank of 5. Different assumption (yours was correct) but same result.

Ultimately its fair as my competitors are listed on the same low ranking listing as I am!

[aventvoy]

Hi there,
You all seem to konw quite a lot on this PR stuff...
Could one of you explain me why the PR on my index page disappeared, from 5 to 0 ??
I haven't changed anything in the reciprocal links or site structure, and continue doing some pages updates on a regular basis... So the site is not "static" but in constant evolution, except maybe for the reciprocal links and other links which almost don't change. So why would the PR fall like that?
Thanks for your comments.
Alain
http://www.aventurevoyages.com

[jhales]

aventvoy:

i just visited your site, you have a pagerank of 4. which is not bad. sometimes the toolbar doesn't display pagerank, but it hasn't disapeared. it is simply the toolbar being inconsistent.

[aventvoy]

Hello Jared
Thanks for checking it.
What happened in fact, is that I had entered http://aventurevoyages.com, and for whatever a reason, when you don't type the www the PR doesn't come out...
So it only went down from 5 to 4, well, I'll blame it on the toolbar unconsistency, it's easier!
Have a nice week end and thanks again.
Alain
http://www.aventurevoyages.com

[Black Knight]

Originally Posted by aventvoy

when you don't type the www the PR doesn't come out...

The www is actually a subdomain. It is a really common one, and one that we almost all use. But is is an entirely different address to that of the root domain, whether or not you've chosen or been given a redirect to make them both supply the same content.

Because the majority of your links use the www subdomain format, that is the address that has the PR score.

Some time ago I created a simple JavaScript that can help a little with this issue.
http://www.webmarketingplus.co.uk/re...avascript.html

This simple piece of javascript ensures that visitors entering your site as http://domain.com/ are immediately moved to http://www.domain.com/ thus helping to ensure consistency in the format of your URLs used in links and bookmarks.

The reason for wanting to do this is that several search engines analyse link popularity, but that many of them, including Altavista, FAST and Google currently treat the URL with the www. subdomain as being a different page to the same URL without the www. prefix.

[SolarDirect]

What does it mean when you have a PR of "Current Page is not ranked by Google"? One of my sites that was launched in May still has this: https://shop.solardirect.com It does have some listings in Google even though I have not submitted it yet for inclusion. Googles cache is from Oct 8th. It appears that the only links to the site are from other pages in the same domain. Can I assume that this is why it does not have a PR yet? Because of no external links? But this does not add up since I know I have links from other sites of mine with PR4 pointing to this url. Also when I search for a specific page in the site on google, it shows links from other sites??? I have just started a link page https://shop.solardirect.com/links_submit.php trying to get inbound links, so I imagine this will help. Also, how offer does Google update PR?