From the studying of Pr that I've done and my experience on my site, I'd have to say the following: 1. PR seems to follow a sliding scale when it comes to links and keywords to more or less popular keywords. example: My cleaning site is a PR5 with 43 google back links showing and only a couple of higher than PR4 pages linking to it. Now to accomplish the same thing in a harder keyword like home mortgage, the sites I've followed had to have closer to 300 back links showing in google, with many of them being much higher pr than the number to be obtained. I feel google must somehow average out the # of links to sites covering certain phrases and applies the pr now on a 100% sliding popularity scale. If you have more of a links score than 50% of those in the index than you must be a PR5, 70% a PR7, or the lowest ten percent in the link score and you get a PR1. This is the only way it all seems to make sense. __________________
Hmm, I believe PR works in two ways, firstly it is an, or near an expedential scale, so it takes twice the resources to move from 2 to 3 than it did from 1 to 2. Secondly different clusters, keywords, industries or any othrer grouping have their PR on differnet number bases, usually from base 7 through to base 10. The pr for cleaning keywords may be based on a base scale of 7 where as highly competitive areas such as finance will be based on a higher scale. This is where the complexity and 'unknown' factor comes into play. If it were as simple as you are suggesting I think we would all be manipulating G and making promises to our clients of a PR of X before we sign contracts. Anyone elses thoughts? -s.
Actually I think you are saying what I was trying to say. That there is some sort of sliding scale for more and less popular keywords. Anyone else agree with this.
The exponent is about 5, so for example: PR1 = 7 PR2 = 35 PR3 = 175 PR4 = 875 PR5 = 4375 So basically you ARE correct in saying that as you go up the scale, it gets more difficult. This is because the range is bigger as you go up. Keep in mind that this is just the toolbar -- the internal numbers (the 7, 35, etc.) are what Google uses in the actual calcuation (the passing of 85% of PR/outgoing links algo). And I disagree entirely -- PR is math. Nothing more. It isn't based on category, it's just a number. Lastly, you CAN semi-safely gaurantee PR. I can get to a PR7 with enough money easily. Gauranteeing SERPs is ridiculous, but PR is pretty easy to guess at. It isn't as complex as people make it out to be (SERP rankings is).
I understand what you are saying someonewhois but even with an exponent of 4 or 3 instead of 5, the math wouldnt work to give my site a pr5 rating. Keep in mind this site is only 4 months old and doesnt have even 150 google backlinks to speak of. I know they dont show all of them but I can compare yahoo and msn backlinks to get an idea of what google sees. I have to disagree with you. I wish it was just about the math, but there are to many other issues that dont carry accross in an even way to other site. Anyone else!
the only thing that i care about is how pr is related to the traffic that i get from google. so if i fret about pr, it'll take away from my seo... that's about the only relationship that i can see between pr and google traffic.
I will attempt to locate the source of the following info but here is a basic summary of what I read the other day. Where PR is still important in the Google algorithim is that the links that go to your site are automatically filtered for a certain period of time. The higher the pr of the page that links to you the quicker google will accept this as a trusted or natural rank and allow that site to reap the benefit of the link in its search results.
Your PR is based on your Genre....if you are in Home Mortgage, since there are so many similar sites, you are compared to them...if you are in a low competition genre, you will get more PR.