PR 10 List

Good point Don. In my post above I have also indicated another reason why in the real world his analysis is WAY off. I don't know of a high PR site (again a site containing a PR10 page) that doesn't get external links to interior pages. In short there are several sources of PR juice on a site with a HIGH PR page.

Hi dburk,

Thanks for a more "grown up" response to my post. Yes, my math wasn't precise, it was just an example I'd heard Matt Cutts give when he was talking about PR sculpting and so forth. You're exactly right about PR being calculated in a logarithmic way.

That's kind of my point about the wikipedia pages. To gain a PR of 10, for example, you would need to have a good few links from a P10 page, dozens from a PR 9, scores from a PR8 etc etc. The PR decay guarantees that the PR10 index page, along with the number of links coming off each page and each subsequent page, will not create any further PR10 pages within the site without the aid of external links.

Thats very true, and the problem is that taking the page to PR5 would require, for example, 100 links from PR4 page, hundreds more so if there are a lot of other outbound links on those pages. Remember, link juice gets divided between the outbound links.

For those good at maths, the google PR algorithm:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

I did see a graph of how that actually effected linking, wish i could find it again, and it was a real eye opener. The gaps between the PR levels as you get higher is simply enormous.

This was just a simple way of explaining PR - taken from none other than Matt Cutts. So in a real world scenario, it's actually as good a description as anyone outside google can give.

Not at all. As a web designer and SEO of many years, I've plenty of "real world" experience as to how site navigation works and how PR is passed around a website. I didn't say anything about links going out into the blue yonder at all. All I was pointing out was that in sites with 100,000s of pages, having an index of PR10 isn't going to pass around to every single page. Pages in Wikipedia and sites like that are HEAVILY linked to, especially the higher PR ones, that's where they get most of their PR from. They are simply too big for the PR10 of the index page to raise ALL pages up to any kind of level like the index page. That's why you'll still find pages on wikipedia with a PR of 2 or PR 3 or maybe even less, in fact, there are plenty without any at all.

Granted, having a PR10 index page is going to probably guarantee that most of your pages are going to end up with a reasonable PR without any other links. I would suggest installing the SEOQuake toolbar and navigating around wikipedia. What you'll find is that the further you get into the site, the PR of the pages drops. What this equates to in the real world as you put it is that on sites like cnn or whatever, the pages with all the good link juice aren't ones you can put your link on.

Wikipedia is nofollow.

Oh I've read around, trust me, and the types who use the term "dofollow"... well...

No there wasn't anything contradictory about that at all. Frankly, what with that and the "spare me" comment, you're just being plain rude and very defensive.

Anyone here who knows any SEO that uses a term like "dofollow" should try and correct them.

I think you just did that.

The point I was trying to make was that fussing around trying to find PR10 sites to put a link on could be better spent elsewhere. You could put a link on a site with an index with a PR of 10 and that page COULD never attain any PR. This is possible, if you look around wikipedia, it's not just new pages that have a low PR, older ones can gain very little too, depending on the content of the page and how many internal links the page has.

A site like wikipedia is a good example of the philosophy behind Google. The idea was that in a network or interlinked documents, the ones with the most important info, the most authoritative and useful to people will have the most links. This is so true in wikipedia. In any given subject category, the most important, vital pages will attain the lion's share of the PR. The lesser pages, whilst they might gain a little, won't have anywhere near as much PR as those cherry documents.

Of course PR flows around a site and as you say, not necessarily in a linear fashion, simply because sites, like the example of wikipedia, aren't linear.

Might the last letter end in "E?"