35 replies to this topic

[Jill]

Sounds like an anomoly. They wouldn't show the 300 backlinks. Unless they've recently changed how they do things for penalized sites.

Can't say I've looked into this lately, but I dont' think they'd change something like that.

Jill

[Mel]

At the moment I wouldn't trust either the toolbar Pr or the backlinks from google as being accurate.

I just looked at a site with a toolbar PR of 3, but which Google shows no backlinks to even though Alltheweb shows 625 backlinks, some from Pr 5 and 6 pages.

[mcanerin]

I've got a question I hope someones knows how to answer.

It seems to me rating a site on a scale of 1-10 (ie PR) would be kinda useless with all the diversity in the web. Is PR actually 1-10 or is it rounded off, like a 0.4 is called a 0 and a 4.3 rates higher than a 4.22, even though they both say PR4?

Could this be it? Anyone know? That way a so-called PR0 would show up sometimes, but not others (ie true PR 0 vs PR 0.34)

Ian

[Jill]

Ian, it's way more complicated than 1 - 10. That's just the only graphical way they can show it. There are definitely decimals involved, and if I remember correctly, a bar graph really can't represent true PageRank at all.

This is why some of us will qualify when we talk about actual true PageRank, or ToolBar PageRank. Toolbar PR is graphically represented from 1 - 10, but the real true value of PageRank is so much more complicated than that.

Hope this helps!

Jill

[Mel]

Hi Ian:

I can't provide a definitive answer to your question (doubt that anyone outside of Google can) but as I understand the toolbar PR:

It is a graphical representation of the real PR number but is on a logarithmic scale, possibly a log 6 scale. Suppose that real PR is a number between one and ten billion, PR one might represent a range between one and one thousand, Pr 2 might represent a range between something like 1001 and 10,000 Pr 3 10,001 to 100,000... Pr 10 might represent a range of 5 billion to ten billion. Note that I am NOT saying that these are the real numbers but illistrations of how it might work, in order to show the main points that:
The higher the PR the more difficult it becomes to go up one point
The real difference between say a high PR3 and a Low PR4 might not be much at all, but the difference between a high PR 3 and a high PR 4 might be quite a lot.

IMO it really doesn't tell us much, but it does give us a nice green bar to look at and puzzle over, and which keeps us from thinking so much about the hundred or so other factors in the Google algo.

[amberbaby]

does anyone know why a page would have a PR0 and a PRx depending if you type www. in front of the URL or not ?

On another note: my PR just dropped from 5 to 3, but my rankings didn't change much. I think PR is a bit of a red herring when it comes to ranking.

[Mel]

Hi Amber;
www.something.com and something.com are different pages as far as Google is concerned so if you have links to both you are not getting the page rank your site deserves. Better to stick with one or the other and change all links to whatever you decide.

[bwelford]

Mel, I thought your explanation of PageRank was excellent. I agree entirely with your explanation.

On your question, amberbaby, the PageRank is a measure that exists for any URL that has been evaluated by Google. The following URL's are distinct:
www.mydomain.com
mydomain.com

So each has a calculated PR based on the links that point to it. This is why it is important to consistently use the same URL in all your references - Forum signatures, e-mail signatures, business cards, letter heads, etc. If not you may end up with splitting your PR between two URL's when you could have lumped it all on only one.

Barry Welford

<edit>Sorry, Mel, you added your comment while I was composing mine. Thankfully we agree!</edit>

[Web Player]

Berry:
This is a new idea to me that www.domain.com and domain.com are not the same to Google.

Does this mean that we should advise or users to type www.domain.com instead of domain.com when searching for out site? It is after all the same site page regardless of how I get there. So how or why does Google make the distinction?

On another point, I can only control the links my site visitors click or the links in email so, as I understand it, those links should always be consistent: either www.domain.com or domain.com.


Do you know if other search engines are this particular?

Web Player

[qwerty]

There's more to it than this. Google treats all of the following as separate documents:
www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com
www.domain.com/index.html
http://www.domain.com/index.html

[bwelford]

Web Player

I agree with qwerty re Google.

For other search engines, I did a quick check.

For Altavista, I got the same link count for either version of the domain name.

For AllTheWeb (FAST), I got different link counts.

To be safe, you should standardize on one version.

Barry Welford

[mcanerin]

As a practical tip for newbies, if you are thinking of pointing blog.com, www.blog.com, aaa-blog.com and blog.de to the same site in the hopes of trying to get 4 top sites for the same pages under the impressions you've just been given, it doesn't work that way. The "duplicate pages" are ignored.

Some of the above posts may give people that impression and I'd like to keep you out of trouble.

Ian

[lmsoren]

Hello again people,

My Toolbar PR returned to it's normal score sometime today or maybe yesterday...Of course I was never worried about it...well, at least not after I had consulted with this great forum here :-)

So thanks again!

/lmss

[JamesW]

Is PageRank actually that important compared to the other SEO areas (such as title, keywords,etc)?

[qwerty]

In my opinion.... NO. It's not even close, as far as I'm concerned. I think people obsess over it because it's something they can see (even if what they see is very inaccurate).