why would a page rank different from google.com and google.ca search engines? what factors in the algo are different in each?
Same reason as any PageRank is different - fewer people link to the local Google variations than the main Google.com site.
yes,i think the difference is mainly the backlinks from .ca (or sitewebs in canada) and other regions (such as US).
Good question and none of the above responses make any sense to me. I have sites ranking higher at .ca and have seen others experience the same thing or vice versa which doesn't really add up.
The reason for this is that google is moving toward personalised search. One of the ways that they are doing this is through geographically relevant results. If you do a search from a canada IP, or by using google.ca, then google gives higher priority to sites that either (a) are hosted in Canada, or (b) have a canada extension. They have signalled that they intend moving further in this direction, with other methods of identifying geographical region. Personally, I think this idea is not a great one, since most of the quality information online is in America, it's going to reduce surfing quality for people online outside of the states. But that's me. Anyway, that's why the results are different.
The geo targetting is a fact, however, it still doesn't answer one important question. Why would for example a site that is hosted in the US (one of my sites) AND is being accessed by a Canadian IP (me) rank higher in the .ca than the .com?
We are talking about PR of two sites here, search engines to be exact, so I can only think of 2 factors. Backlinks and age. --Joe
Well the question was a little confusing but I think he is talking about a "page" "ranking" differently at each address since he is asking about the algo not the PR of .ca and .com.
Is this a coordinated-yet-poorly-timed April Fool's joke...? Of COURSE he's talking about why one site would rank higher in Google.ca than Google.com. I cannot believe that there were that many people trying to explain why the PageRanks were different. C'mon now! I don't know the full validity of this, but at least one explanation I heard is that the spam and/or penalty filters are applied differently to the various country versions of Google. This does in fact seem to be the case, when you look at different sites methods of SEO and how they rank in the different tld's. -Michael
This is one reason - localized results (language). The second reason is that, different datacenters work independ from each other and collect different data which gives different results.