Just from looking at page rank movements across a number of sites I believe Google has introduced the concept of market category page rank. This is where a page has been rewarded for gaining links from within its own market category. I've witnessed pages upgraded to PR5, PR6 and PR7 with only a few - but highly relevant - links. Meanwhile pages with thousands of links have remained at PR4.
Ah, very interesting theory. I have actually been thinking along almost exactly the same lines, just with a little different twist. You know how some pages are getting a low PR home page, but have inner pages with a higher pagerank, even though most of the links were pointed at the home page? I have been wondering if the unrelated links to the home page are not helping the pagerank of the homepage because they are unrelated, but whether that pagerank is passed along to the inner pages because the home page is probably related to the inner pages. Any thoughts on this twist?
Nathan, my view that the latest page rank update is actually penalising pages with too many irrelevant links. A small number of highly relevant and obviously human generated links will therefore provide an edge over sites with a mish mash of automatically generated links. Quality is being rewarded.
When I saw one of my websites with PR3 homepage (after last PR update) and two PR5 subpages (subpages has no back links), I was thinking in the same way like you. BUT let's say that the toolbar shows market category page rank. In this case all subpages can be max. PR3 too. And don't forget that 99.99999....% websites has link to home page on subpages. So the homepage has back links from related inner pages. Anyway the last update was really interesting. We will see what will happen in the future...
Could be that the home page is penalised as in essence the irrelevant links are pointed there. But the home page then works as a "penalty filter" and the "true" PR value passes to the sub pages.
Same here I just browse a site http://www.dropshippersinfo.net/ home page pr3 and inner pages have pr6.And even i got pr3 for my new site that has hardly any link except forum signature.
I have a brand new site, havent done a thing with it yet. It has a link pop of 4, 2 links from pr4 sites, 1 link from pr2 and one from a pr1 and with the update my site is a pr4. I was wondering wtf?
One of my inner pages with a higher rank than the rest is new. The url matches better and words are separated in it so this may have something to do with page rank factors.
I have 3 blogs and their Page ranks are 5, 4 and 4. I am happy with them as I am blogging only for two months.