Of course PageRank is overrated these days, but out of curiosity, how does the PageRank values distribute to other pages nowadays? A quick look at some PR values on some pages, you can quickly see it does not appear to be like it was two years ago. Shawn at DigitalPoint started a thread he named Internal Link Passes More PageRank Than External Link. In that thread he explains how he has page A, which has a PR 7, it links to page B and page C. Page B has only one link, and its from page A. Page C has many links, including one from page A. Now Page B, with only one link, from page A, has a PR 6. Page C with many links, including one from page A, has a PR 5. Does that make sense to you? Certainly, since both page B and C have a link from the same page, page A, page C (with more links) should have a higher PR then page B (with only one link, the same link page C has).

Let me quote Shawn's example:

For example:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/ is the only page that links to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/faq.html

Check MSN: link:http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/faq.html
Check Yahoo link:http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/faq.html

So with a single link, that page is PageRank 6.

Now there is also a link to the support forum:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14

That URL is linked to from numerous other places as well, so at the very least it should have the same PageRank I would think... right?

Check MSN: link:http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14
Check Yahoo link:http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14

Instead, that page has a PageRank of 5.

I did not link to the pages, I don't want to kill the linkage data. :)

So what is up with PageRank these days? There are many theories in the thread. I personally do not know for sure, but I would bet the PageRank of the old works a bit differently then the PageRank of the new.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Like The Story? Vote For It On Yahoo Buzz! Or On Sphinn!