The title of the page says it all.. "Eric's guess of how Google's Page Rank works" No-one outside google knows and all anyone can do is guess
That is a very bad example. Pagerank is most likely calculated from a net, with a iterative formula to achieve a number from 0 to 10 corresponding to the total number of urls on the entire internet. What this means is that as internet grows, your site must keep getting inlinks to keep it's pagerank - otherwise it will slowly lose it's score (to other sites). See http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/ for a more detailed explanation of this.
This isn't a bad example, I believe it works similar to both what the thread starter said and what you say. It probably exists on a factor of 8 and some sort of dampening or correction factor based on the number of pages indexed in G.
Uhm, no. The total number of points in "total" PR is a finite number. With the above suggestion it would mean the sum of all PR would be infinite. How about you read the article I linked?
I think mdvaldosta was talking about the factor of 8 meaning that a PR7 requires 8x(PR6) - whatever that moving number may be. I think the article is a pure guess, but to put in simple terms, PR may represent a constantly changing number, but each increases in PR represents a proportional amount greater. I think that number may be 6 or 8, but you need 6 or 8 times more "points" to increase your PR .... i.e. a PR6 is 8 (or 6, etc) times harder to get than a PR5. I've seen data that tends to support that... people have calculated the average number of backlinks of a PR6 site and the average number of backlinks for a PR7 is six times greater. Of course that isn't exact because of variables in the number of outgoing links per page, but I think it as good as guess as any.
Page Rank is Google's way of increasing publicity and "word of mouth marketing". And it obviously works really well... Does it really matter how PR is calculated? No Brad
Anyone can know how the pagerank algo works, as it's clearly explaind in the original google paper and the article linked in my sig The topic starter is right somehow, but there isn't such a thing as page points. PR actually can be between 0.15 (if they didn't change this) and very big. The toolbar PR scale is adjusted to this. So it may be that, although you didn't lose any PR, on the toolbar your PR decreased one point. It's just scaling.