9 replies to this topic

[garfy]

I have one question

let say i exchange link with a site that has PR6 on homepage

and they put my link under their subpage that is only PR4, does it mean that my site is geting PR6 or PR4

I am confused

What if some site has homepage PR7 and linking page PR0, does that mean that that link is of no use???

[justicewhite]

It all depends how the site is designed. How many clicks away is the internal page from the home page?

In one way it does not matter what the homepage PR is as your link is from an internal page.

On the other hand, if the homepage has a high PR, then the PR for the internal pages likely to go get close to the homepage depending on how many clicks away they are and how new they are.

[Randy]

Not that PageRank means all that much, but to answer your question...

It's the PR of the page your link appears on that counts.

[Jill]

None of it actually matters, but to answer your question, the PR of the homepage has nothing to do with anything, unless you're linked from the home page.

The PR of the page that links to you is what you should be looking for, if you're interested in PR.

BTW, we have this new section of the forum devoted to PR. So please browse through the PageRank Forum for lots more info. There were a ton of posts here from the past few years that are all categories now.

[Michael Martinez]

I have one question

let say i exchange link with a site that has PR6 on homepage

and they put my link under their subpage that is only PR4, does it mean that my site is geting PR6 or PR4

I am confused

What if some site has homepage PR7 and linking page PR0, does that mean that that link is of no use???

The Toolbar PR values of 0 to 10 are meaningless babble that tell you absolutely nothing about whether a link from a given page will be helpful to you.

Worrying about PageRank, as others have already indicated, is a waste of your time. It won't help boost your rankings in the search results.

The actual PageRank that is conferred is a value from somewhere between 0 and 1, it is very, very small, and it is divided evenly between all the outgoing links on the page. So the fact you are accepting links from sites that have reciprocal link pages means you are accepting links with extremely small, virtually worthless PageRank. You are not "getting" PR6, PR4, or PR-anything.

It has never worked that way, it will never work that way, and the day certain people in the SEO community stop preaching that it does work that way will be a great day for Webmasters everywhere.

[Jill]

that tell you absolutely nothing about whether a link from a given page will be helpful to you.

As much as I don't put any stock in PageRank, I wouldn't go so far as to say it tells you absolutely nothing.

It does provide a little indication of the popularity of a page. Which is slightly more than absolutely nothing, but not something worth worrying about very much!

[Michael Martinez]

The Toolbar PR value doesn't reflect anything meaningful by any measure published in Google's Webmaster guidelines or any of the academic papers I have read (and I have by no means read them all -- but no one has ever cited one with a relevant reference).

The second Page/Brin PageRank paper talks about the proxy they devised for the Google directory, and most people assume that proxy is the same as the Toolbar PR value, though some discrepancies have been noted through the years. The discrepancies are inconsistent and since we know that Toolbar PR is only updated about once every three months, they are insignificant.

But since the Toolbar PR is only updated once every three months, it tells you nothing useful about whether a link from a given page will be helpful.

Also, Jill, remember that Matt Cutts has recently pointed out on his blog (which he emphsizes is just his personal outlet and is not an official Google resource) that sites with good PR and reputation can and may have their ability to confer reputation (PageRank and anchor text, in his words) blocked.

Hence, looking at the Toolbar PR value for any given site is a waste of time. It certainly won't tell people how many outbound links are on the page, nor whether the page is able to confer reputation, nor whether the page is being crawled regularly, nor how well any page being linked to will perform in search results.

So, maybe it's an indication of popularity and maybe not. I have pages that get PR 4 values and there are virtually on links to them, except from my own sites. And I have pages with PR 5 or PR 6 values that have hundreds or thousands of links pointing to them.

The Toolbar PR just doesn't indicate anything useful for search engine optimization.

[Jill]

I don't care what the papers or Matt Cutts says. I prefer to use my own brains and my own observations.

There is *some* value in looking at the toolbar number when you want to judge the overall popularity of any given page. It's not very accurate, and there are many other things that you need to look at as it's often artificially inflated or simply not working correctly.

But it can provide one extra thing to take into account when doing any overall observation of any given page.

Generally, I agree with you Michael about this. It's not by any means an important measurement, but I just can't agree that it has completely and utterly ZERO importance. On a scale of 1 - 10 it has perhaps an importance of 1 as something to look at. Maybe even 1.5.

[Michael Martinez]

It's your forum, Jill. You can have the last word.



No, seriously. Take it!





Merry Christmas.

[Jill]

Then why did you ruin it and take the last word?