Well, here comes yet another Google PR update.  It seems that with each update I am left scratching my head how and why Google calculates PR.

I’m not going to name any URLs, but just visualize this.  Two PR 3 directories, which were created about the same time, each having a much different backlink profile.  I will take a look at these in more detail in this post.

The first PR 3 directory has a total of 905 backlinks reported by Yahoo Site Explorer.  Looking at these backlinks, I can see that none have any PR.  In fact, most of the links are from other directories.

The second PR 3 directory has a total of 64,000 backlinks.  The first ten backlinks all have PR 3 or 4.  And the kicker, this PR 3 directory has a backlink from the other one!

Now it does not take a mental wizard to figure out which directory is more popular or at least better promoted.  What baffles the mind is how Google can assign the same pagerank to both directories when one has 60 times the backlinks as the other.  And these backlinks are certainly of a much higher quality.

I understand there is a lot of variables that go into PR.  And one could say that the directory with 64K backlinks has paid links.  While that may be true, the directory is quite unique among the many other directories out there.  So it has a good reason to get these backlinks by natural linking.

On a personal note, most of my sites lost 1 PR point.  The funny thing is this blog, which I do not promote, maintained its PR 1.

With each one of these PR updates I believe Google is moving further away from providing a true gauge of each page’s importance.  It almost seems as if PR is becoming nothing more then a tactic to sway the linking patterns of Webmasters.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 4:32 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.