Google PageRanks considered subtle February 21, '07 Comments [17] Posted in Musings Sponsored By I did not know my Google PageRank until Phil mentioned it to me a while back. Apparently it's like the Richter (not Jeffrey Richter) scale in that a Page Rank of 6 is 10 times "better" than a Page Rank of 5, if I understand correctly. Someone approached me to do advertising on the site, and since the bandwidth bill is due, I quoted a price I though was reasonable. She said, "but you only have a Page Rank of 5." This, for a moment, I become aware of this number since this advertiser cared. I looked in the Google Toolbar and saw this: Ok, looks like my Page Rank is 5, seems reasonable. However, later I noticed that if I was at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ (note the lack of default.aspx) the Page Rank was 6. Seems like even though the home page is the home page, if there's a default.aspx at the end, that's a less "powerful" page. I can only assume that more folks link to http://www.hanselman.com/blog than to the page with default.aspx. Apparently 10 times more, which seems reasonable. I mentioned this to Phil who said, "weird, let me try" and sent me this screenshot where his Toolbar says my page is a 7. If I understand it, that's 100 times more shiny than a 5. Or, just +2. Who knows. if Google's PageRank system is this subtle, and URIs aren't well canonicalized in their system then what's the point, Dear Reader? I know not. Seems like voodoo to me. UPDATE: This post on the WebMaster group in response to another user says: The page rank you see is not the pagerank Google uses. - The pagerank you see is exported 3-4x/year - It is "guessed" at whenever the page did not have a pagerank back then. So if you have a "toolbar pagerank" (the one you see) TBPR 3 for your homepage, and add a new sub-page, it will guess your sub-page to be (perhaps) PR2, even though it doesn't have a real value for it yet. - It is page-based ("page" rank :-)), not domain / site based - Your sites internal interlinking structures determine how pagerank is distributed among the pages - in the simplistic example where you have a single page with is fed with pagerank (from the outside), you could determine how that pagerank is spread among your pages based on the link-structure in your site. You'll likely just give up if you have more than 5 pages though :-) - it's not worth it. - Your example with the homepage with a high PR and the other pages having lower PR is perfectly normal and could be a "steady state" Interesting stuff. « Tips on 2007 Conference Attendance | Blog Home | Using ISAPI_Rewrite to canonicalize ASP.... » About Scott Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author. About Newsletter Sponsored By Hosting By