Or so I’ve been led very strongly to believe recently. There’s always bundles of crap floating around about how this will give you high pr and that will damage pr, and this other thing will invoke a pr penalty… but what they all boil down to is that you should get high pr links, and LOTS of em! They say that’s what you “need” to improve Page Rank.
But Do You Actually?
Case in point: My beloved and most beautiful partner (because she might read this) runs a small independent film review website, where she takes on Hollywood actors, tears them down, slaps them about a little, and gives her honest opinion on their performances and the films as a whole.
She hasn’t posted much, but what she has written has been good, solid content with general good use of keywords, which are in this case actors’ names, film titles, and directors, etc.
Today I was having a look at her site to see if there were any new reviews to read
I shall not lie to my readers
Today I was having a look at my inbound links and noticed a PR2 referral coming in from ForgottenFilm, I thought that was a little strange, and probably a mistake - so I went to the site to investigate further. But no, no mistake had taken place accoring to my trusty Firefox plugins.
So, I decided that she must have some how obtained a rather superb link somewhere and I was determined to help her get some more poach the link location and crowbar in some of my own sites.
First I ran a LinkDiagnosis on the site, and this is what I got:
This is what I like to call “fucking nothing”. Nada.
I found a couple of PR-Nothing forum links, and a couple of utterly useless PR0 links from an old crap wordpress.com blog that I’ve had for ages. To clarify, she has a total of 5 inbound links, none of them with any PageRank.
Thinking that this was strange I delved into Yahoo! Site Explorer
Once again, a nice healthy dose of NOTHING.
Same links, no page rank.
So friends, foes, and family alike - after all our collective whinging about how PR is obtained, how is it that a site with no links and an alexa rank of near 15million is able to grab a PR2 after less than 6 months of existance?
I mean I’d love to start sprouting conspiracy theories to do with Google’s new quality rating system and say that because the writing on her blog is of such high quality, she has benefitted from it. But I don’t honestly think that’s the case.
So what is it?
I’m stumped on this one, so give me a kick in the comments and tell me whats going on.
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September 17th, 2008 at 3:58pm
A few months back, when the “Company” link on my website was prominent at the top, it had a PR2, like the homepage, but the rest of the site had a PR1 or had none. It was also the most important page according to google (the one that appears tabbed right under the domain when searching… am I clear?) until very recently, when it was replaced by the forum’s index page. I’m forced to believe content is a major variable in the PR algorithm, probably along with the “refresh rate” if I can call it that (how often it is updated). But that’s only my take. The about page went down to PR1 since we moved the link to the footer.
September 17th, 2008 at 6:33pm
Maybe there was a PR2+ link at one point and some time after the Google Toolbar PR value update occured the link was removed
September 17th, 2008 at 8:03pm
Well, the PR you can see using a toolbar or online checker means nothing really.
True PR is much more complex and detailed and will most likely take into account things like:
Traffic through the site
The number of searches pages appear for
The number of actual clicks (possibly as a percentage of searches performed where the page appears)
Content refresh (as stated)
I suspect that Google also possibly monitor time spent on a page and movement between pages on that site.
… and umpteen other factors.
The visible page rank is also only updated every few months.
September 17th, 2008 at 11:51pm
I agree with Mark. Probably a couple of sites with PR linked to it some time ago, but those links are gone now. PR will likely drop now that they’re gone when Google gets around to updating it.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:53pm
Thanks for the comments guys, have to say that I agree with Pete - I’m not convinced that the site had a PR2+ link previously, though I’m not ruling it out as a possibility! Will be interesting to see what happens during the next PR update :)
September 19th, 2008 at 12:30am
You don’t need to have a PR2 link to be PR2.
Although I can’t verify this (only Google knows for sure), I’ve heard that most new sites actually start at PR3. You won’t see this at first, until there is a toolbar PR update (once every 3 months or so). So if the site is PR2, it may have started at PR3, then been brought down to PR2 because it hasn’t gathered enough links. Note, this is all guess work, but it’s what people in the know (not me!) seem to say.
I can assure you though, if the site is ever to get to PR4 or above, it’s going to need backlinks.
September 19th, 2008 at 10:15am
Thanks for the comment Stephen, though I’m not sure that I agree with your theory. I’ve watched many new sites go live days before an update and they’ve gone from the N/A status straight in at 0 if no links have been established yet.
September 19th, 2008 at 4:51pm
Maybe it’s the theme! that wordpress theme has gotten mega heat lately, i’ve seen it linked to on a bunch of design sites, maybe some code embedded within the theme info could be giving the high ranked “illusion”
or maybe i’m just confused about what you mean.
September 19th, 2008 at 6:13pm
Good theory! And I would actually agree with you on that one.. except that the theme was only installed a week ago!
September 20th, 2008 at 7:33am
A PR2 is not a high number. It’s achievable with virtually no external links at all (and 6 months is plenty of time). PR is page-based, not site-based.
There are plenty of explanations of PR around, but the salient points are that google doesn’t show all links to a site, the toolbar is updated infrequently, and PR is less important than ever before in the ranking algos.
September 20th, 2008 at 12:06pm
David, I realise that PR2 is not a high number, I didn’t say that it was. Show me another site with PR2 and not a single link?
If you read my article again, then you’ll see that I didn’t count any links with Google, I didn’t talk about the Google toolbar, and I wasn’t writing about the importance of pagerank.
It may help you to know that I’m not a beginner shouting off my mouth about pagerank.. have a look at the rest of the site ;)
September 27th, 2008 at 10:34am
My website has only been steadily growing in PR it has a 50 or so inbound links, some of them are 3 or 4 but my PR somehow slipped from PR2 to PR1 overnight o.O
October 9th, 2008 at 8:53am
After only something like 6 weeks of launch and a bunch of posts the big G did an update and I found myself with a PR3 for the homepage and my most popular post to date with a PR5 and others also popular with PR4 so I personally have to believe that the inbound link theory is working in this case…
October 14th, 2008 at 6:29pm
I have had the same happen to me but i have not even put much content on this site, It jumped from PR0 to 4 for no reason.
I am also stumped,
October 19th, 2008 at 2:03am
I think her page rank may be because she has so many “hot” keywords. Maybe that is what gives it the illusion of being a higher ranked site. Maybe one of Google’s algorithm’s ranks sites on the quantity of “hot” keywords disbursed throughout the site. Then it looks at related sites that have the same amount of those keywords and ranks her site the same as those other sites.
Alexa is trying to do that with their “Related Sites” algorithm, but it seems to rely too heavily on user interaction. Thoughts?
Jeremy
December 19th, 2008 at 7:33pm
The same thing happened to me in on of my blogs, it has just 2 weeks, and just one link from other blog with PR 1, and it had PR 2. I do all the in site optimization I could, meaby Google liked that.