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Understanding PageRank Distribution
I am getting interested in better understanding pagerank distribution. An index page that has the most links pointing at it rightfully should have the highest PR but my categories that are now linked on the lower right hand side of this site have varying pagerank (from PR3 to 5), why? Until recently I didn’t have categories linked on my sidebar so PR distribution was uneven. If this is true/then after the next visual toolbar pagrank update all categories should rank PR4 because my index is a strong PR5 (all categories are now linked in the sidebar and were not before).
I also have very few internal pages/categories linked from other sites so there will not be much increase in PR gained from other sites directly linking to them but logically someone could link to a page/category with a high PR and boost its value.
The way to correctly determine if my speculation above is true is to study a blog that has always linked categories from its sidebar. Let’s checkout Matt Cutts blog, look to the right and click each category to see if PR is distributed evenly. What you will find is that Matts index is a PR7 and all categories are PR6 proving that even pagerank distribution comes down to linking.
This also says that you could remove categories that you DO NOT want to pass more pagerank to.
New website owners often are confused as to why their homepage has less pagerank than their internal pages, in this case it often comes down to few links pointing to the index and more pointing to specific pages.
You control pagerank distribution not Google.
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January 29th, 2007 at 9:34 am
The dynamic linking ebook you get as a bonus with Revenge of the Mininet really does help you understand some of what is going on.
The negative aspect is that if you overly control pagerank distribution, you might lose the benefit of relevance, which is why I go for the massive ball linking approach on andybeard.eu
In some way I benefit from the mass of duplicate content pages as well, because those pages don’t have any comment/trackback leaks on them. They also have different benefits for relevance.
Google often decide that one of my tag pages is more relevant than individual posts.
January 29th, 2007 at 9:35 am
” An index page that has the most links pointing at it rightfully should have the highest PR …”
Nope.
“…my categories that are now linked on the lower right hand side of this site have varying pagerank (from PR3 to 5),…”
Toolbar PR is meaningless anyway. Why are you still looking at it?
“New website owners often are confused as to why their homepage has less pagerank …”
If people in the SEO community would stop writing about Toolbar PR, there would be considerably less confusion on the subject.
January 29th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Andy - I believe you are right, I got rid of all duplicate paths and am doing worse, will be putting the wordpress calendar, categories and everything back to make as much noise as possible. Weee =P
Michael - I am going to ask what Rand Fishkin asked of you the other day, if you are going to comment please expand your know it all type responses. I would be interested in hearing more than just “nope” and toolbar PR doesn’t matter. I am seeing toolbar PR make perfect sense on other peoples blogs who do not mess around with stuff as much as I do. Stop being such a grumpy old man, you have much to offer.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
if you optimize your pages for maximum pagerank distribution, you may lose on relevancy. However, if you leave all duplicate path pursuing relevancy, and you have many pages, you may just end up in the supplemental index which is a lot worse, that will mean that your pages will not just lose relevancy they will disappear from the SERPs whatsoever and that’s happening to a whole lot of people out there. That kind of strategy is a shame for google because after all the sites must be optimized for google not the end user, who will care about users if that hurts traffic?
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I recently got a PR of 0 for my index page and what confuses me is that my cool-sites category has a PR of 3. Thank you for clearing this for me Aaron.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:00 am
You are welcome Louie!