Page Rank curiosity

[randomness0]

Hi,

I'm just curious why a couple of internal pages on my site have a Google Page rank of 4 whereas the rest of the site (including home page) only have PR of 3 or 2.

There's no external links to these particular pages that score higher with respect to PR - just seems strange to me.

Cheers
Richard

[farees]

It could be for any of the following reasons

1. More content that specific page when compared to the rest of the pages within the site
2. More internal links coming in to that page (especially if the internal links have relevant anchor text)
3. More updated content on that specific page.
4. If you want to get a little more technical you can always look up the log files for the bot visits on that page.

- Farees

[AussieWebmaster]

External links to that page also count

[randomness0]

As i said in the original post there are no external links to the pages that rank as PR4.

Of the points raised by Farees, only number three might be relevant as the pages are updated a couple of times a week (even though there is minimal content).

Cheers
Richard

[AussieWebmaster]

You don't need the inbound links to be higher in PR. It is really about quantity.

Every page gives away 85% of its PR through outbound links: so if there are 5 outbound links and the page has a PR of 3 then each link gets 3 x .85 / 5 = .51 so if you calculate all inbound links you are getting an idea.

[JohnW]

PageRank does not come from the content on the page regardless of how much or how good the content is. Also, PageRank is not increased by how frequenty the content is updated or spidered.

PageRank comes from other pages that have PageRank, that are linking to a particular page. The links might be from inside your site, or outside, and may be links that you do not know exist.

Footnote*
If you think that good content creates PageRank, that’s only true in a roundabout way - because good content may attract links, and the links can provide the PR. But ultimately, links are the only way to get PageRank.

[randomness0]

That was my understanding of the situation. However can I just repeat that the pages that have a page rank of 4 have no external links at all - only internal links (and the number of internal links is no different than a lot of other pages on the site).
There has to be other factor(s) influencing the page rank for these pages unless it is just an anomoly.

If i'm allowed to post the website addresses then I will in another post (not sure if i'll get accused of merely posting to get a link to my site .....not the intention of the original post).

[randomness0]

The webpages that I am discussing are
Home Page (PR3) http://www.innerwestmassage.com.au

Internal Page (PR4) http://www.innerwestmassage.com.au/dayle_availability.php
http://www.innerwestmassage.com.au/richard_availability.php

(If editor wishes to delete this particular post then that's fine with me - I'm just trying to understand why the particular pages are ranking higher than any internal page that links to it)

Cheers
Richard

[JohnW]

PR is distributed unevenly throughout your site, this is likely because of a combination of at least 2 things: out of about 110 total inbounds, only about half of them point to your homepage, so combined with the spotty way the site has been indexed (and therefore, the way internal links are credited), these factors could cause the effect you see. I did not try to track it down.

Other than that it could be a G bug.

[PhilC]

Of the 4 items that farees listed, only #2 affects PageRank, but it's nothing to do with anchor text, so forget that part of #2.

PageRank is passed from page to page, as you know, but you may not realise that websites don't come into it. A website's pages are just a few pages in the huge index, all of which pass PageRank between them. There is no PageRank border drawn around a website.

So any pages in your site that have IBLs from other sites, pass the incoming PageRank to other pages, including those within your site. As JohnW said, the reason that one of your pages has a PR4 whilst the others have less is because of the link structure within your site that is passing more PageRank to it than to the other pages. Even if the page has IBLs from other sites that you don't know about, it's still the link structure within the site that's causing the difference.