Its unexplainable that a page can get a decent Pagerank 3 without any backlinks whatsover? Here is the PROOF for my statement: So here is one of my starter website on webhosting affiliate - check the URL - http://www.top-webhosting-services.com Even after me struggling quite a bit, the above mentioned website homepage has a Pagrank 0 (he..he..) (I will be thankful if someone can PM with some advice on this.) But surpisingly the Alexa page "which lists the Alexa Rank of my above mentioned website" has a Google Pagerank 3!! Check this URL - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/top-webhosting-services.com I quickly checked the alexa pages of the most successful websites in my niche and I was surprized to see that - Though they have active pages in Alexa (which are being updated regularly with the stats), but Alexa page of those websites are not even being indexed by Google!!! So what is so "special" about the Alexa page which lists my website? The only thing is that I do visit that Alexa page almost daily!! But I do visit my website home page also daily - so why my website homepage is still having a Pagerank 0 (while the pagerank of the Alexa page keeps climbing in an unexplained fashion)? I am sure that its just me who solely visits that page. I am "extremely" sure that this particular Alexa page has "Zero" backlinks!! I also checked it. So how does it still manage to get a Pagerank 3 without any backlinks whatsoever? (Also with just one visitor daily - that's me) Another question that arises in my mind: Are we blindly creating backlinks for our websites without pondering upon whether any other factors also exist to give our websites a good Pagerank the easier way??? Hopefully the URLs that I just pointed out can give the answers. If you do - then do share the results with this thread too please. Any Google Pagerank experts in this forum has the answer?
that page has many backlinks from the domain info pages on the likes of cubestat.com statbrain.com surcentro.com etc etc.
Those links that you see were created recently by me trying my bit to popularize my own website - Just included those recently in an desperate attempt to give a bit of kick to my few backlinks...but those are just a handful - definately not enough to give a PR3. You can check - my website too has those backlinks and much more (but does not work on my webpage). But I can assure that the PR3 that I mentioned on the Alexa page existed much before those "handful" of backlinks came into existence.
PageRank is a measure of link popularity. It measures and is directly affected by the quantity (the number) of inbound links and quality of inbound links. It's the quality portion of this PR measurement calculation that has likely changed the most over the years. Originally, it simply measure the number of links and the amount of juice passed was basically calculated as roughly 85% of the PR of the page linking to your URL divided by number of outbound links on the page linking to your URL. All followed outbound links on a page used to be passed the same amount of PR or link juice. Over time Google has refined the calculation and added various quality modifiers where now they may not count certain followed links if for instance the URL linking to you is underpenalty. They ignore inbound nofollow links in PR calculations now. They may only give you partial credit for inbound links that are part of a site's template like a footer link, a blog roll, or even possibly links from pages that appear unrelated to the keywords used to link to your URL. Who knows. There are likely LOTS of these modifiers and it's constantly evolving. I don't think there is a problem at all and everything you're seeing fits into what is known about PR. top-webhosting-services.com: 1) Domain never existed until 04-Aug-2009... Probably went live at a minimum weeks later... probably got indexed weeks later... So it's probably only been indexed for a couple of months at most. 2) PR=0/10... Not surprising. You ARE aware that there are actually 2 types of Google PageRank aren't you - the Toolbar PR (the little green bar in your Google toolbar) which means absolutely nothing, is always out of date, and is not used for anything other than to get people like yourself frustrated... and the "actual" page rank which you will never know, is always up to date, and is what is used in Google's ranking algorithm. What has likely happened is that when the last Toolbar PR update occured, your site had very few if any backlinks. It should be noted that to publish a PR update Google has to make a snapshot of their entire index with all of their URLs and corresponding "actual" PR values and then map those to a 0-10 rating for the toolbar. This snapshot is taken weeks before the Toolbar PR update is published. The 0/10 you're seeing in the toolbar only gets updated once every 2-4 months typically. So you're looking at an OLD PR... Likely what your sites PR would have been the first week or two it was live. Perhaps this post on what is Google Page Rank will help clear up or explain why you can see 0/10 in the toolbar when in reality you may already be a 1/10 or 2/10. 3) According to Yahoo Site Explorer you have 74 external links to your home page and NO inbound links to internal pages on your site (74 for the entire site). I didn't dig through them all to see which of those pages are indexed at Google, what their PRs are, how many outbound links they each might have, etc. But just eyeballing it, I'd guess you might be a PR1/10 ATM. Just as an FYI... This makes for a VERY weak backlink profile. Authority is based on many sites linking to many of your internal pages. If most of the inbound links to your site are to the home page, it will never be seen as authoritative. alexa.com/siteinfo/top-webhosting-services.com: As far as the Alexa page is concerned, nothing surprising there. I am a full-time SEO for a PR7/10 commercial site, and I can create a new page on my site and have it to PR6 or PR 5 when the next Toolbar PR update comes out without ANY external links. The page will get that much PR from internal linking... like from the home page and/or site-wide footer links. Again, the PR3/10 you're seeing is OLD. It reflects what that page's PR was weeks before the last Google Toolbar PR update was published. You're looking at history. It's kind of like looking at a star in the sky that is 10 lightyears away but the star burned out 5 years ago. You'll continue to see its light for the next 5 years even though it stopped putting out light 5 years ago. I've never poked around on Alexa's site to see how they link, but my guess is that somewhere on the site the list and link to sites that they are tracking statistics to. Otherwise the engines would never discover pages like your site's page. They have to have a way so that crawlers can discover new pages where they are tracking stats for sites if they want them indexed and to continue to be indexed. I'll bet they even have a more prominent place on their site where they highlight the newest sites they are now tracking. It's these internal links that likely gave that page a PR3 a couple of months ago... Summary: Other than quality factors (and things that influence them) that may paritally or totally discount how much PR is passed into a page by an inbound link, Google's PR calculation is pretty much ALL about links.
Hey Canonical.. Thanks for providing me suggestions for my website. Also I agree with all the points that you have listed except one. The explanation on why the Alexa Stats Page of my website is a PR3 is not 100% convincing . Question: So why whould the Alexa stats Page of the top websites in my niche not have any PR (rather they are not even being indexed by Google)? I am a systems engineer and not an SEO expert here - but with the examples that are right in front of my eyes (and the same I have presented to this thread), I sense there is something else going on here too (and maybe its not just the backlinks that is doing the trick with the Pagerank)! Maybe the backlink thing is a bit hyped??? (I am not stating that backlinks do not work - its probably that there is something more than just the backlinks to get a better PR!). And again - I have always read that no one yet knows "for sure" all the parameters that Google rate a site upon.
Who knows? Maybe the page wasn't created until AFTER the that snapshot was taken to create the last Toolbar PR update. Maybe the URL changed and the new URL wasn't in the index when the snapshot was taken to create the last Toolbar PR update which is often the case when a page is indexed yet is shows "Current page is not ranked by Google" in the toolbar. Maybe they have URL canonicalization issues where multiple variations of the URL can render that same page (www vs non-www, various query string parameters, etc) and you are looking at one of the versions of the page that are not linked to. You can see an example of this if you go to http://www.top-webhosting-services.com/ and note the 0/10 in the toolbar PR... then go to http://www.top-webhosting-services.com/?xyz=123 and note "Current page not ranked by Google". It's the same page... WTF? Oh wait, same page but different URL. http://www.top-webhosting-services.com/?xyz=123 would typically only get indexed and have a visible toolbar PR if it has inbound links pointing to http://www.top-webhosting-services.com/?xyz=123 with that particular query string parameter. Could be a lot of reasons for this... My point is that you have no waying of knowing what that pages' backlink profiles looked like 2-3 months ago or whenever it was that Google took the snapshot of their index so that they could map actual PRs to Toolbar PRs and publish a PR update. This is why everyone says the Google Toolbar PR is worthless. It's OLD... it doesn't get updated that frequently so it's misleading... I would not waste even a minute trying to figure it out because unless you are the webmaster for Alexa and where monitoring the backlink profile for those particular pages, you have no way of knowing why they are showing as PR3 or no PR in the toolbar.
Thanks Canonical... Though I am bit confused still (as always!! ), but your points looks good to me. Has anyone any other comments too?
I found two factors which should have influenced the sudden Page Rank noticed in my original thread above: 1. Internal Page Linking - As “Canonical†mentioned, most probably Alexa might have worked out some internal page links from its higher ranking pages to the page which lists my website, resulting in higher page rank to the same. But a question still remains that why this phenomenon does not occur to other sites registered in Alexa (including new sites which are registered - I had few of my other sites which was registered along with this site, which never showed up any Google Pagerank). 2. It goes back to my statement in the thread that I used to visit the Alexa Page which had my site listed often. After reading the below article from Wikipedia, its pretty clear that my constant visit probably too had some effect on the Pagerank of the page listed in the original thread (Points to be noted - My browser has Google Toolbar installed which I have given permission to send all my browsing info back to Google; My understanding so far is that this phenomenon can only be noticed very clear on sites which are already with a Good Pagerank on their homepage): Information as quoted from wikipedia.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank): "The intentional surfer model The original PageRank algorithm reflects the so-called random surfer model, meaning that the PageRank of a particular page is derived from the theoretical probability of visiting that page when clicking on links at random. However, real users do not randomly surf the web, but follow links according to their interest and intention. A page ranking model that reflects the importance of a particular page as a function of how many actual visits it receives by real users is called the intentional surfer model[15]. The Google toolbar sends information to Google for every page visited, and thereby provides a basis for computing PageRank based on the intentional surfer model." Read more at Wikipedia's link that I have mentioned. So Guys install Google Toolbar on your browser if you have not done so far and start visiting your own websites!! Other than the Google Toolbar, I also understand that you can pass information about your web pages (which are not indexed) if you ping the pages sometimes using the tools mentioned below (I got this valuable info from Warrior Forum post - http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...nus-links.html - I am not connected to the product mentioned in this link and I am not trying to promote it in anyway - just it has useful info): Firefox Ping-O-Matic Button | AchieveItMarketing.com Pingomatic Bookmarklet - Ping Any Page Any Time