Diluted High PR Links - How Valuable?

[halfpoint]

In your experience, how much benefit do your links lose if there are also many other outbound links on the same page.

The PR juice splits evenly between all of the links on the page, correct?

If this was the case, how valuable would a bunch of PR 4-5 links be if there was already 20-30 outbound links on the page? (I'm talking about PR 4-5 pages, not websites)

[halfpoint]

[edgray]

Hi Pat,

I saw a video of Matt Cutts explaining roughly how PR works. Basically, imagine you have a page with a PR of 4. If there was one outbound link on the page then a PR of 2 would pass to that page. If there are 2 links, then they'd get 1 each. 10 links would get 0.2 PR.

So the PR is divided equally amongst all of the links out of that particular page.

Hope this helps!

[metafever]

Originally Posted by edgray

Hi Pat,

I saw a video of Matt Cutts explaining roughly how PR works. Basically, imagine you have a page with a PR of 4. If there was one outbound link on the page then a PR of 2 would pass to that page. If there are 2 links, then they'd get 1 each. 10 links would get 0.2 PR.

So the PR is divided equally amongst all of the links out of that particular page.

Hope this helps!

Thats what I was going to say.

PR is always divided against all out bound links.

So if you get a link on a PR5 post that has been bent over by the "buy viagra" guys, then go fish.

Your better to be on a PR2 page with 10 OBL.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Pat Jackson

If this was the case, how valuable would a bunch of PR 4-5 links be if there was already 20-30 outbound links on the page? (I'm talking about PR 4-5 pages, not websites)

Great question. I've tried to explain this to a number of people and they don't get it. Whether its a profile link, blog commenting, directory etc the principle still holds. You want links on pages with as little other links as possible. The more people posting links on a site the lower PR you are getting.

So you can feel good commenting on a PR 8 page blog post but if theres a hundred other comments with outbound links you might have well posted on a PR 1 with just yours and a few others.

Its critical to post on pages that don't have too many other outbound links and its also the reason you don't want to drop 5 and 6 links of your own on one page and pretend to yourself you are getting the full benefit of linking from that page.

[MarkAse]

That really is a good explanation from Matt Cutts regarding how link juice is divided....it makes a ton of sense and means that it is more important then ever for us to find sites and pages that all the other IMers don't know about.

[bluelambda]

I don't think anybody outside of Google knows exactly how the split goes. But I don't believe it's accurate to say if you have 2 links on a PR4 page, a PR of 2 would pass to each.

Pagerank is known to be an exponential function. A PR3 site is thus exponentially more "valuable" in terms of link juice as a PR2.

You can check out this site for more:
Scaling The Google PageRank Mountain

[dburk]

Originally Posted by edgray

Hi Pat,

I saw a video of Matt Cutts explaining roughly how PR works. Basically, imagine you have a page with a PR of 4. If there was one outbound link on the page then a PR of 2 would pass to that page. If there are 2 links, then they'd get 1 each. 10 links would get 0.2 PR.

So the PR is divided equally amongst all of the links out of that particular page.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ed,

Your explanation is partially correct, but for the sake of clarity I will try to refine it a bit.

The link value is divided evenly among all of the outbound links, however a PR 4 page with two OBLs do not reduce the value of those links to PR 2. Google uses a logarithmic scale for scoring PR. Therefore, half the value of a PR 4 link is still far greater than the value of a PR 2. In fact it is still greater than the value of a PR 3. You need to dilute the value of a PR 4 a great deal before it equals a PR 3.