My site has a Page Rank of 4 on many pages. I have begun selling links to other sites for a small fee. I have 50 or so backlinks. Here are some of my higher Page Ranked links: Run of site text link including a Pr 7 subdomain, PR 5 homepage and 45 PR 4 pages. [*]A PR 4 intregated forum text link [*]A PR 5 text link All the links are from relavant websites. When adding a paid link to my website recently I noticed the next day that my Page Rank had dropped to 3. This was hard to believe because when I calculate what my PR should be (using the Page Rank formulas available through out the web) my site was well withing the range of PR 4, if not PR 5. I immediately removed the last link I added, which was to a questionable website with a PR of zero. Then within minutes my pagerank retured to 4. I have three questions: 1. Am I not getting full pagerank value out of the PR 7, PR 5 homepage and 45 PR 4 pages because they are run of site? ( I heard that google devalues run of site links). 2. If I cancel the run of site links and just keep the PR 7 link from that site could I see better page rank transferring to my site? 3. Could I have been penalized in page rank from linking to a banned or low PR site? Thank You
Probably, also PR depends how many outward links a page has. If the page with PR7 doubles its outgoing links then the PR flowing to each would halve. No, in general the more links you have the higher your PR so keep the links there. Not sure. However if google thinks you are buying or selling links then they may devalue all of the links. Matt Cutts says
Without even being penalized, the pages with that one link on it will have more links in total, thus giving less PR/link. This includes the links back to your home page, so this may just have been enough to make your website go from 4 to 3 if it was just on the borderline.
The way that I understand how page rank works is that Google tries to reach a medium with it. As I think TMan said if you have link going away from your site the less the links mean. Having 1 link away is way better than having 4 links away. I do wonder though how you managed to see a change in one days time. The toolbar does not update that often so you should not have seen it happen. Were you using one of those predictor tools out?
No I wasnt using a predictor tool. The google toolbar, on internet explorer, was registering 3. However when I used pagerank predictors they all said future pagerank was 4. And out of 3 future pagerank predictors only one confirmed the toolbars low page rank of 3. Almost instantly, when I removed the link in question the toolbar reported a PR of 4 again. Perhaps the link even rubbed Google the wrong way, and even though my PR might of recovered, it would still be bad for my site in the long run.
Was your website PR3 before the jagger-update? Maybe it was just one of those glinches of old PR you saw, and it didn't have anything to do with the link you added. You could try adding it again, just to see if PR drops again. Would be interesting to see this I suppose.
I would add it again but I have been reading that linking to PR 0 sites is dangerous. I dont want to get banned or have any negative reprocusions. The site is new, is this general attitude about not linking to PR 0 sites too cautious?
I think linking to a PR0 site can be dangerous if the site has a PR0 because it is penalized. If it's just plain PR0 or too new there's nothing wrong with linking to it. I'm not sure about this though.
It had to be a glich in the bar. There is no way that you are seeing realtime PR, also the odds of G seeing a change in 10 minutes is next to none. If you have a realtime toolbar you could sell the information and make a bundle.
Yeah I would agree with Ken. Realtime PR is not a reality. Those predictor tools are useless too. they might be right but they are most likely wrong. It had to be something left over in a cache on your computer or the page never finished loading which can make the PR stay at the same place it was for the last page you visited.
It happened again, I removed the last PR 0 link. The PR (on my tool bar) went back to 4, like I posted above. I tried it again with another PR 0 site. This one like the last one was new. Once again the tool bar on internet explorer showed PR 3 just seconds after uploading the change. This time I am going to leave it for a few days and see what happens. Any one else had this happen. Is this what happens when you link to a banned site.