I Need A PageRank Explanation

[kindsvater]

It's not like I'm new to this, but I was looking at some odd website analysis using Market Sumarai, and also directly on Google using the SEO Quake plugin.

In a couple places their reported stats wildly differ - which is a little disconcerting.

But they do agree on this:

A page with zero backlinks can have a PageRank of 2.
A page with 2 backlinks can have a PageRank of 5.

But,

A page with hundreds (or thousands - the stats differ) of backlinks can have a PageRank of 0.

You can look at this yourself. The search term is:retro sunglasses

I always thought of PageRank as an evaluation of how important a page is - primarily based on links to the page.

But can a page be considered important if it has no links?

[PatriciaJ]

I've noticed the same thing when using Market Samurai but my guess was that those pages with no backlinks have original quality content. Also a lot of backlinks doesn't mean that a page has any quality.

[Marx Vergel Melencio]

Originally Posted by kindsvater

It's not like I'm new to this, but I was looking at some odd website analysis using Market Sumarai, and also directly on Google using the SEO Quake plugin.

In a couple places their reported stats wildly differ - which is a little disconcerting.

But they do agree on this:

A page with zero backlinks can have a PageRank of 2.
A page with 2 backlinks can have a PageRank of 5.

But,

A page with hundreds (or thousands - the stats differ) of backlinks can have a PageRank of 0.

You can look at this yourself. The search term is:retro sunglasses

I always thought of PageRank as an evaluation of how important a page is - primarily based on links to the page.

But can a page be considered important if it has no links?

I think a page can be considered by Google and other search engines as important even without backlinks with these factors:

1) domain age,

2) fresh, useful and properly SEOd content added regularly,

3) onsite SEO (optimized sitemap.xml, robots.txt, meta info, layout and navigability features),

4) accessibility for software used by disabled people to view sites and online content (Google and Yahoo! among others offer accessibility features with their services),

5) media content richness, and

6) compliance to W3C and XML standards.

I think if those factors are nicely satisfied, then "quality" backlinks become important.

"Quality" backlinks I think = natural-looking links on pages of diverse non-spammy sites with high domain authority and PR as well as high relevance to anchors used for the links.

[Peter Gregory]

Originally Posted by kindsvater

A page with zero backlinks can have a PageRank of 2.
A page with 2 backlinks can have a PageRank of 5.

But,

A page with hundreds (or thousands - the stats differ) of backlinks can have a PageRank of 0.

PageRank is only calculated by incoming links not content of the page. Pages that have PR push link juice and PR to their outbound links as long as it is a followed link, meaning it does not have the rel=nofollow attribute to it.

Now with that being said a page with pr2 that has no backlinks is either an error in the tool you are using OR I would guess someone using a 301 redirect to hide their links from competitors. What they do is build links to a separate domain and then 301 that domain to the main site (losing a little bit of pr in the process) but making it much harder for competitors to find out where those links are coming from because the do not show up in typical tools like yahoo site explorer, etc when searching for incoming links to that page, but a majority of the pr does push through the redirect.

And yes a site can have a pr5 with 2 backlinks as well, but they would have to be links from higher pr sources passing a lot of link juice.

And yes again, a page can have thousands of backlinks and be a pr0 because those backlinks are likely very low quality non-pr links.

Hope that helps to clear it up a little but if not let me know and I'll do my best to elaborate.

[Fraggler]

Originally Posted by Peter Gregory

Now with that being said a page with pr2 that has no backlinks is either an error in the tool you are using OR I would guess someone using a 301 redirect to hide their links from competitors.

It is usually due to internal backlinks. MS doesn't include internal links in their value.

An Amazon product can often have a PR4 with no backlinks - all internal

Ezine Articles can often get a PR4 or 5 - all internal (you need to be on the most viewed/published lists for this).

You-tube is about the same.

They are all easy to knock off their perch though