Sites that begin with the letter A

I've been scratching my head about the reason one site got a PR 5 this update and the other got a PR 3. I used a similar strategy for optimizing both, and I have come to the theory that it is because one started with the letter A. What do you think?

 

Now why did you come up with this theory? Why would that make a difference?

 

alphabetical directories?

 

I'm sorry, but I really think you need to shut down your computer and sleep some hours.

It doesn't make sense.

Do they have the same content, links from the same places, the same age, the same update frequency, the same etc & etc?... I'm sure they do not, and that would be the only way for your hypothesis to be valid.

 

Here's my wild theory:

Some of the links pages may have been alphabetically organized. It is a known fact that Google pays higher priority to content near the top of the page. Higher position on page perhaps means more pagerank.

Also, perhaps there is a large, multi-page link directory alphabetically organized. As the site grew and added more links, the newer pages were created to handle the volume. The later alphabet links got bumped to further pages, while the one that started with A stayed on the original link page, which due to age would have accrued a higher PR.

 

Your theory could (and maybe is) completely valid.

But from dvduval's message, it look like his talking about sites, not pages on the same site.

 

I was more referring to off-site linking. For instance in a directory, or perhaps on sites with a larger amount of links. It's entirely possible that if he submitted to enough (most likely spammy) directories and large link exchange programs, that a result such as this could occur. Although the PR gap experienced is fairly drastic. This may have

I know a site with over 9,000 backlinks, is 3 years old and has PR 0. The mysteries of Google are not for mortal men.

 

Yes, I was referring to the increased likelihood that links will appear near the top of pages and be on the first page of directory category pages.

 

www.autoimager.com is PR6. Don't think the first character matters.

 

It would depend on where you get your links from as well. There is some merit in what dvduval is asking....... but a PR5 Vs a PR3.

dvduval said similar linking.... he didn't say exact. I can have similar linking to numerous sites but it only takes one link to make the PR different.

 

It is?

Since PageRank is determined by links rather than page content, I highly doubt it.

 

just depends on which version of the truth you are using...

 

It is said that the content at the top has more weight, but it is not demostrated.

By the way, and from my experience, the age of the link has some weight on its PR. So the first to come, the more PR gives (IMHO).

 

Lol!!!

 

Top of the page may not be an issue, but pagination often bleeds page rank as you go deeper and deeper.

 

letters do matter in some directory links. For example my site www.splaytech.com is in the dmoz.org directoy under consumer electronics, except it starts with an S so its way on the bottom of the pr5 dmoz page. If it stared with the letters aaa then my site would be the #1 link there and would get bet search rankings with search engines.

 

No. Thje problem is there's about 200+ links on that one page which IIRC is about PR3 or PR4. That means that each of those links gets .85 * {page PR} / {number of links on the page} - but the ones near the top don't do any better than the ones on the bottom.

It may make a difference for human visitors who probably take a few of the top links and never make it to the bottom, but spiders and SEs don't care (unless the page goes beyond a certain limit, past the limit for spidering, whatever that is now). And of course you'll hardly ever find humans searching for things in DMOZ anyway...

That page, by the way, violates Google's own guidelines for webmasters.

 

yes i realized that because google says that every page has to have 100 links or less on each page but that obviously has way more. Does that make any difference for the links on that page?

 

The main thing it means is that the available PR is extremly diluted in terms of the benefit any single link gets...