PageRank where it does make a difference
- 26th Jun 2007
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- Google
SEO
Last night on strikepoint the chatroom got a little heated over Pagerank, and I was asked if pagerank is so important why isn’t SAP.com a pr9 website, out ranking www.bssnj.com pagerank 4 website and www.businessoftware.com another pagerank 4 website for the Search Term Business Software Solutions
ok first off having more pagerank than your competitor doesn’t mean you will rank high than them for certain keywords. But it does mean that you will get more pages indexed in Google than your competitor and if you have a large website, it will keep you out of supplemental index.
example for Business Software Solutions
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.bssnj.com
has around 49 pages some are supplemental already
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.businessoftware.com
has around 2,500 pages many supplemental
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.sap.com
has 103,000 pages and I had to go to the last page before I found a supplemental page.
Ok this isn’t new it’s been like this for quite awhile, Pagerank for ranking purpose scores little in my books and shouldn’t really both you, but Pagerank for getting lots of pages indexed so that you can become the authority .. well that another game all together
ok I’m not going to pull these rankings apart for you I don’t think thats fair , but I will go out on a limb and say the #1 site is ranking due to it’s many Yahoo Directory listings, you will need to jump over to sitexplorer to see that I mean
so if you want to play seo detective I would start with http://uk.search.yahoo.com/siteexplorer/search?p=http://www.bssnj.com check out those Inlinks and the next time someone asks you is it worth getting Yahoo Dirctory listings, Point them to this post :)
DaveN
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Dave,
I am working with a client who is under the notion that any link on their site that points to another site will result in diminished PR for their internal pages. They’ve even gone as far as to suggest that they will specifically to keep their hard earned PR (which they mostly got by spam mind you) to themselves. I’ve explained to them that if this were truly the case, no one would link out, thus killing the whole notion of a link counting as a vote. Do you have any evidence or knowledge supporting or refuting my claim??
Lee Only my word..
This yes you will loose a small amount of pr but the quaily score boost will out way that
Exactly my point. How about you make a toolbar with a little green bar and label it ‘Quality Score’…Down with PR! :)
lol .. would you install a toolbar i made :)
If the toolbar was good, why not? But on a more serious note - do you use any definable metrics when talking about a site’s quality score? I responded to a post earlier at Search Engine World where a guy was saying that a Google rep gave his site an A in SEO (as part of some official evaluation…). It seems like SERPs aside, there are very few metrics that mean anything…
Just to see what was going in and out… absolutely :)
I’m not sure I agree that a link out to another site will diminish one’s own PageRank.
I once put up a page with over 5,000 links on it and after it was indexed, which was a miracle in itself, and toolbar PageRank was updated, I didn’t notice any change in any of the site’s PageRank. That page also had the same PageRank as all the other pages interlinked to similarly.
That was with no increase in the number of inbound links during that time so I know it wasn’t a matter of new PageRank being reduced although on the other hand, since true PageRank can be huge while only displayed as an integer between 0 and 10, there may have been some change that I did not see.
But then again, any change there may have been was not big enough to actually effect the toolbar PageRank.
Another experiment I performed was to put up a test site that had inbound links to only one page and I disallowed all the other pages using robots.txt and nofollow’d the links to them from the single allowed page.
During that time, although that one page had links to all other pages on the test site, none of the other pages showed any PageRank while the allowed page did. After the toolbar PageRank update, I then opened up the remaining pages to being indexed and removed the nofollow’s.
After the next toolbar PageRank update, while the newly allowed pages started showing PageRank, the original page’s PageRank didn’t change.
It seems to me that the “flow” of PageRank is more like “votes” from one page to another are reflected across a boundary as opposed to actually flowing from one to another.
Of course neither of these experiments are proof positive but I think I can say that if there is any actual “loss” of PageRank by linking from one page to another, it is not enough for one to see from the toolbar PageRank display.
Even if I am technically wrong according to how Google actually implements PageRank calculations, I wasn’t able to see any difference at all so being wrong would seem moot. :-()
PageRank leaks slightly if you link out, but usually not enough for you to notice, and you probably won’t see any impact on the linking page’s TBPR because that page’s TBPR is mostly determined by its inlinks, not outlinks. If you link out on a well-linked-to page you’ll also lose more than if you linked out from a deep page with low TBPR.
You can build trust by linking out naturally. Google’s trust in your inlinks and your outlinks is what prevents the PageRanks passing through your IBLs from getting devalued. If you don’t link out at all, you are making it harder for Google to figure out what kind of webmaster you are - commercial, link buying, link swapping spammer or a tree-hugging free-linker.
Has anyone got any tips on getting into yahoo directory..? Still working on getting into DMOZ (even bribes to an editor i met online ha ha ha “well you don’t get if you don’t ask”). But i didn’t realise until i’ve just read your post how powerful it is!
God damn these directories…!
Yes you can pay for Yahoo directory.