Just curious, what will happen to a site with decent pagerank, but no backlinks? What's the best strategy for maintaining PR on a site like this? i.e. how to maintain PR without being banned from google etc... How can a site have high pr but no backlinks? Clearly there are other factors affecting PR as well? Thanks, VG
PageRank is about backlinks and nothing else. Unless there is some fluke, you cannot have PageRank without backlinks. "Decent PageRank" is a relative term. Are you talking about a PR4 or PR5? Google doesn't show all backlinks for a site.... try yahoo or MSN to see. I doubt you don't have any backlinks because google won't spider it. I've seen some domains picked up out of redemtion that still show toolbar PageRank, but that will go away without any backlinks. To maintain PR, you will need backlinks. You won't get "banned" because you don't have backlinks, you just won't have PR. You may get de-indexed without any backlinks, but that isn't the same as being banned. Check yahoo or MSN for backlinks to your site and let us know what it says. Also, there is a redirect trick where someone can show the PR from another site by fooling google. Even though it shows PR in the toolbar, you aren't getting any benefit of the PR showing.
by decent, i mean it has a PR of 5. it does have a link that i know of from the front page of a PR6 site (with very few other off-site outbound links on this page), but that link doesn't show in google. (It has had this link for years) The site is several years old, and Yahoo does show some backlinks, but not google. The site has pretty much been sitting dormant for about 2 years - same content - i think it's 13 pages? and i was thinking about revamping it, I was just curious how it could have a PR of 5 with 0 BL in google. I checked, and it has 11 BL's in yahoo, and 8 in MSN.
google shows only a small percentage (10-15%) of links. If you see 10 links in google's link command, you actually have 100-150 links in google's database.
Your PR6 link where the PR5 is coming from. A single PR6 link without a lot of outgoing links will do it. It is believed that a link can pass up to 85% of its PR to the site it is linking to. The PR6 link could also be close to a PR7 (6.99 etc). Google counts backlinks that they don't show as backlinks. It is a little odd they don't show a PR6 site as a backlink, but nothing to worry about as it is obviously passing PR.
That's what i thought. i checked on one of the other outbound links from this PR6 site, and it also has a PR of 5, and it's a one page website. Thanks for the info! VG
we a script (google API and Yahoo API) to look at the sites of different sizes to come up with the number (considering the sizes of Yahoo and Google index database)
you should not focus on PR, its all hype. Just make your site the best it can be and people will want to link to it.