PageRank Calculation (or Guess)

I know PageRank isn't all that valuable anymore, and it's logarithmic, so this is probably a difficult question...

Our main page is PR7, and everything click deep was a PR6... I think 15 or so pages).

The recent PageRank/back link update kept our main page at PR7, but everything one-click deep is also a PR7 now. So even though the main page stayed PR7, it appears to be a much stronger PR7 since it can sustain 15 links as PR7 as well.

Anyway, based on that little bit of info, I'm curious if there is anyway to guess or calculate how far off the main page is from PR8...

- Shawn

one analysis of your site might suggest that the 2nd level pages [one click deep] are not contributing that much to the pagerank of the index page.

i say this because they were all so close in rank [and now even].
so what this tells me is that of all the pagerank that your 'site' has to toss around...it is being distrubuted quite evenly between all the pages of the site based on the current linking system of the site.

i havent looked at your site linking system specifically...but i am suggesting that this is one possible scenario based on the criteria of you post.

if this is true...the solution would be to direct more pr to the index page from the 2nd level pages. [this may not be possible or practical based on your site design or navigation requirements.]

Out inbound links come from all over the place... we don't do any "artificial" linking (link exchanges or paying for links for example).

We have roughly 1,000 external back links to various places within the site. The main page has a few hundred... and I would guess less than 20 to all the "one-click" places off the main page (since they are the generic sections). I think the second most popular page people link to is to our Optigold ISP products page.

So you are right when you assume the "one-click pages" don't contribute much. But our site was designed with the end user in mind, not funneling PageRank. I don't really need the main page to be PR8, I was just curious is anyone knew if a PR7 that was strong enough to sustain 15 or so pages at PR7 also means it's close to PR8 or not... Just for my own curiosity than anything...

- Shawn

FYI FWIW: For reasons not entirely clear to me, my personal web site had a PR7 for a long time, with second-level links at PR6. Several months ago, I dropped down to PR6, and all my second-level links dropped to PR5 also ... but recently, the top-page bumped back up to PR7 with subsequent increase back to PR6 for the second-level links.

You seem to be seeing the difference between a "strong 7" and a "weak 7", but as implied above, my experience so far has been more of a step function, but that's just one data point and I don't auto-track this like I do some of the SERP's (although I've considered doing so using the IE cache trick to get the Google checksum for a very limited number of my own web pages).

alek

P.S. Last year, I ended up with a buncha inbound links to my 22,000 xmas lights because folks enjoyed not only viewing 'em, but turning 'em on and off with the webcam ... but didn't feel this did any major bump-ups on my PR. I posted in another forum about my Hulk Halloween Lights with webcam/webcontrol and I'm kinda curious to see what that does to PR - my guess is that it won't be much (?)

As an aside, it's kinda interesting to compare the referral logs to backlinks and wonder why Google doesn't pick up more of these - probably some insights to how they work there and/or some of the filtering of "low PR" backlinks, etc.

dp:

you say "since it can sustain 15 links as PR7"
what does this mean?

you are trying to find some relationship between your secondary pages ranking and your index page?...but you dont want to talk about pagerank funneling. well...how else would the secondary pages and the index relate?

google sees them each page as a separate entity. so unless you want to discuss 'pagerank funneling', your question has no where to go. its like asking why my index page is a pr3 and your 2nd level pages are a pr7...totally unrelated.

what are you suggesting when you say "since it can sustain 15 links as PR7"...maybe i dont understand your point.

For a single page to sustain PR7... by that I mean I have a PR7 page with 15 links on it (without other links to those 15 pages). The PR7 on the main page is a "strong" enough PR7 that every page it links to also became a PR7. So what I was thinking is that the PR7 on the main page (the one that is able to give any link a PR7 value) must be a PR7 at the upper end of the PR7 scale since it can give out links with enough PR that the destination pages all become PR7 (but a lower PR7)...

- Shawn

FYI FWIW: I just thought about what I wrote above in my earlier post, and when I dropped from a "weak 7" to a "strong 6", all of the sub-pages ALSO dropped to 5 ... but then they popped up when the top-level page went back to a 7.

So this further implies a step function ... although again, that just another data point and Shawn's experience is kinda interesting and suggests otherwise - sure be cool if Google would show us that first decimal point - i.e. a 7.1 or a 7.9! ;-)

alek

Well there is definitely a strong or weak version of each PageRank. Although I think that's pretty widely known... that internally PR is calculated on it's true value.

But my 15 pages that were on the receiving end of the link were PR6 before... For this update, the main page stayed at PR7, but the pages receiving the links went to PR7. Although, since the scale is logarithmic, the higher you go the easier it would be for a page to sustain the same external PR value on sub-pages.

- Shawn

Roger that there are non-integer PR values - I'm just not sure how "far out" they make it and when they are "truncated" for subsequent calculations/display.

I.e. in the toolbar, you only get to see the integer value, so at that point, you no longer have the extra precision of the true value. But what is used when receiving PR? My guess (despite what I've observed with my web site) would be Google is still doing all of that internally, and your data supports that - i.e. you can infer if your PR is a "strong" or "weak" one by the second-order affects on the other pages.

Somone at google could, of course, clear this right up, but it's kinda fun poking the "black box" and trying to figure out how it works.

Thanx for posting an interesting topic.
alek

dp:

are you saying that there are no external links influencing the pr of your 15 pages?

Bingo...

- Shawn