Page Rank Mysteries

[Mr. Pink]

OK, there are a few things that I just don't understand about PR, from actual observations.

I am currently comparing one of my sites with a competitor's site. My site is PR4 and my competitor's site is PR5.

My site has nearly 500 backward links form all over the internet. Some of these links are not significant, but some are coming form pages with decent PR. So, a mixed bag.

My competitor's site has only a total of 6 incoming links, of which 2 of them have nofollow tags. In any event, all 6 of these incoming links are from pages with PR0 and 3 of these links are actually from 3 different PR0 pages of the same site (which is entirely PR0).

I don't know how long their site's been up, but their domain name was registered 4 years ago. My site's been up for 10 years (although I did originally have it hosted under a different domain mane, for the first 2 or 3 years).

Also, my site is entirely original and unique and their site is just an uninformative junk web site.

I do have outbound links, but most are through an out.php script. The unprotected outbound links on my site are those of paying advertisers and those the point to my own other sites (which link back, anyway).

Their site has an entire "partners" page with a long list of outbound links. That page is neither protected with a robots.txt file (which they don't even have) nor through a robots meta tag. I cannot find how to navigate to that page from anywhere within their site, and yet that page is still PR3. I checked backward links for that page and Yahoo finds none at all.

Better yet, their home page has dead links that point to a void on their site. I mean, they have anchor text that is linked to #, so they go nowhere.


So, my mind is flooded with questions that boggle the mind.

Does anyone have any idea how a junk site lite that could achieve PR that outperforms an older, carefully managed, original site like mine?

Any ideas?

[Selkirk]

how are you finding the backlinks? Sure you've seen them all?

[Mr. Pink]

I was using http://backlinkwatch.com

Now I checked through Yahoo, by searching for "link:site-url.com" and get slightly different result. Basically through Yahoo I get 13 inlinks, but they are all form that same site.

I am avoiding posting the URL of that site, on this board, so here it is broken down

cgr-report(dot)com


Also, I have yet another original site that has nearly 3,000 incoming links and only a few outgoing ones and the PR is 4. So, I am quite perplexed as to how a junk site (that looks like a textbook example of SEO spam) can get PR5 with only a few low-quality incoming links.

If there were any quality incoming links I am sure one of these searches would show them.

Any ideas?

[Chris]

on-page content has little to do with PR, like nothing, so looking spammy has nothing to do with it.

And, you know, link numbers matter not at all either. I've gotten a PR of 7 with as few as a single incoming link.

I'm guessing the other site simply has some links you're not detecting, maybe to a subpage or whatnot. Or you're not getting the value from your links that you think you are.

Additionally, do not obsess so much about PageRank, what matters is where you page ranks in the search results, if they're ranking ahead of you, then do more work. But if they're not ranking ahead of you, who cares about their PR?

[Chris]

Oh, and in Google, that site has a good number of backlinks. Undeserved, it looks as if they may have bought an expired domain, but they have them, from nice sites.

[Mr. Pink]

Thanks Cris,

Hm, I never thought to check backlinks through Google (dumb) because in the past I've noticed Google doesn't show as many backlinks as Yahoo. But I guess I have to check both in the future (duh!).

Anyway, this explains the mystery. Now I can see how they get PR.

I know PR is not the most important thing, but I just like to understand how things work, which is why I was making this inquiry, about PR specifically.

And, speaking of, I did read your old article about getting PR7 with a single incoming link. I really liked the article... as other stuff you write. ;)