Interesting Fact About Google Page Rank trap 17 and profile pages

[anwiii 17]

a while back, Xisto's page rank was a 5 i believe. now it's a 3. why? i have no idea. what i want to talk about is profile pages on Xisto and page rank. my profile page has a page rank of 2. yes, a 2! i can't believe i just noticed this. so i was curious and decided what other peoples page ranks are and i did a search on the top 20 posters which usually indicates who has been active and here the longest. what i found was amazing and confusing at the same time. on the top 20 list, there was only one other person with a profile page rank. who was it? it wasn't saint michael who not only has the posts posts, but the most profile views. it was opaque. the site owner.


Now from what i know about google page rank is that it increases or decreases depending on how many pages point to your profile. so this got me curious who are the idiots linking to my profile? it's only a profile for gosh sakes. not only that, the pr juice has to be coming from websites that have a higher pr than 2. i understand a little about pr and where possibly some of the pr came from. but for the life of me, i cannot figure out why it's a 2.


i don't have the most posts, i don't have a lot of comments on my page(2), i have an average amount of profile views related to how long i have been here on Xisto, i never really wrote anything on my profile until recently, and opaque has JACK on his :angel:.


page rank is about links. if a website is linking to my profile, it is the ONLY why my profile can gain a higher pr. i don't believe any other factors are factored in. the only thing in question is how does google figure out how much pr a web page to give. THAT is a secret because that is what google is....SECRITIVE. rightfully so though since they want to enforce natural page rankings....not forced ones.


a misconception about page rank is that people think that if you have a higher page rank, you will have a higher search engine rank. that is FAR from the truth, but i think the search engine result pages DO reflect backlinks as part of their algorythm. but the search engine reult pages take in more consideration to other factors besides backlinks. this is why you can see a webiste with a pr6 that is below a website in the search engine result pages(serps) where the top result has a page rank of 4. so obvioulsy page rank doesn't consider much of relevancy or keywords like the SERPS do.


here's my profile page. it's nothing interesting, nothing to brag about, but it's getting a pr 2! http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/


i didn't do anything special to it nor have i promoted it saying "link to my profile page! link to my profile page!". no, non of that haha. so i am going to do a little investigating to see where the back links are coming from and maybe i can find out what the #$% is going on here


so for anyone else curious or even jealous because you can't even get a pr value of two for your own website or web pages, sign up on Xisto, create your profile page, maybe even post a little and get some free hosting and a free domain name while you're here, and see if you're one of the few that can mysteriously get a pr 1, 2 or even 3 page rank for your profile!

[BuffaloHelp 24]

I'm not sure if previous page rank was 5 for Xisto, but currently Xisto's page rank is 4. So if you found that it was ranked at 3, then the PR calculation is different from one place to another. Can't be sure which site really provides the correct PR value.

 

Depending on where you check your page rank it is certainly true that PR value will change. I used http://www.checkpagerank.net/

 

If you have not set URL rewrites, sometimes http://forums.xisto.com/would have different PR than just Xisto.com (in this case, it's not but in the past few of my domains did have different PR values).

 

This basically shows that some sites only count link popularity rather than calculating the actual PR formula. And does PR formula really matter, when the total number of link popularity determines a PR value?

 

backlinkcheck.com/ shows levels where popular links are being "grouped."

 

Google, MSN and Bing are practicing some sneaky tactics. If your IP and search terms fit into regional stuff, let's say keywords to your site, it shows up higher than if you were in a different region. Case and point, my friend's website  slicktom.com/ is barely 1 year old with PR2. Funny thing is we never worked on SEO or anything. It was just built and launched. HTML is dirty and contents are all copied. Yet it shows PR of 2. When we search "slick tom" from Buffalo, Time Warner ISP, his website always comes up as 2nd or 1st place. But, I hop in to a proxy or outside of "regional" IP address, his site is at top 40. Never reaches top 25 yet. Google provides regional related searches first, then most requested, followed by most likely according to IP address and location relevant.

 

So, is PR and search rank important to Google and other search engines? I don't think so. Google provides unrealistic search ranks and PR values because Google themselves do not advocate PR any more. Google scraped PR tools because they found webmasters were focusing only at this value and not paying attention to the contents--the prime initiative when Google was first launched, searching contents.

[Spyda 0]

Good points BH, though it's still kind of confusing at to why a profile page would have a PR 2. Page Rank never really meant anything to me and I know one very successful webmaster whose site is PR1 yet he has the over 1,500,000 posts to his forum and a couple hundred thousand members. As long as your site is successful or making you money and whatnot, then who really cares about its PR?

[mahesh2k 0]

a while back, Xisto's page rank was a 5 i believe. now it's a 3. why?

I've to agree that earlier it was very high PR but now it is dropped. One possible reason is that there is a lot of spam and links to spam sites. Though this is nofollow forum but SE like google do take a look at outgoing links irrespective of nofollow/dofollow tag here. Checking on Yahoo siteexplorer gives us look to site that are linking to us (even nofollow links). So crawlers do go through many outgoing links.

On Xisto, there are many spammer profiles which are not deleted. Many spam replies and links posted on many threads. Even after reporting them they're still there. Outgoing links to spam site does count irrespective of nofollow/dofollow tag. Strict moderation and those who trying to sneak some links(just for the sake of promotion) should get their replies edited with link removed.

I would like to know opaque's view on this as i'm not sure if the spammers posting 3-4 links here qualifies for link-farming or is there any penalty after algorithm update from google.

Good points BH, though it's still kind of confusing at to why a profile page would have a PR 2.

It depends on how page is rated by SE. Your site can have PR4 and internal pages as PR0 or PR2,3 etc. It is how SE rate pages and domain in order to weigh it. Not confusing as SE just trying to find the value of the pages and domain.
PR means a lot when you want to sell your site or you want advertisers to your site. With PR0, try and get me deal from valueclick and CPXinteractive or some other CPA affiliate programs. If you can do that then i'll agree with you that PR has no value and it can earn money with low pr. Nope, low PR brings less deal than higher that i can give you guarantee. PR means a lot if you look at it from promotional/SE and business perspective.

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hi!@anwiiSearch result listings do vary by region - have you ever had somebody post a screenshot of the top 'n' results on a Google search result page and when you actually decided to try out the search, you had a different set of search results? Google does it as I've noticed the different in the Google search results. I can't really tell if Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo follow the same approach too.@BuffaloHelpYou've mentioned MSN and Bing separately, so I was curious and I went to MSN.com just to check if Bing and MSN were really separate. I mean why would a single corporation run two different search engines under the same name? While the homepage at MSN.com used the trademark MSN all over and had absolutely no reference to the Bing search engine, clicking the search button immediately redirected me to the Bing search result page.@SpydaThe Google Page Rank for a website does influence its position within the Google search results. However, if a website were to get a lot of repeat-visitors and did not depend on search results from a search engine for viewership, that would definitely count for something and it would make page rank, back links, search engine optimization, and all of the other stuff that the search engine optimization consultants keep pitching at you, less relevant but that would not stop websites from capitalizing on traffic that the receive from search engine results. Take SlashDot, for instance, which gets a huge number of repeat visitors, or even the Apple.com website. They still focus quite a bit on search engine optimization to try to get new viewership, not because they don't already have a huge number of visitors already arriving on their websites and linking to them, but because they seek to grow their user base even further. Having a good Google Page Rank affects users' view of a website and is more like a badge or a certificate on the Google Toolbar (for the toolbar users) that web masters get to showcase with pride without having to put in any effort.

[anwiii 17]

i wasn't talking about search result listings or serps. i was talking about pr. buffalohelp was talking about the pr of Xisto.com. i should have been more clear as to say Xisto.com/forums/ is a 3 when it was a 5. someone mentioned that it had to do with spam links, but from my understanding, spam links are used to judge serps, NOT pr. page rank is controlled by inbound links, not outbound ones and ever page on a website has it's own pr. so although while buffalohelp was correct in saying Xisto has a pr 4, i was really talking about the main page of the forums.

because i was talking about pr, it has nothing to do with spam links or results by region...although i do find that concept interesting since that just proved there is a relevency factor in the serps.

but my question has still not been answered. why in the world would my profile have a pr2 when other profiles have no pr. i only checked the top 20 profiles. opaque's profile has a pr2 as well so out of 20 profiles, 2 rank with a pr2 and 18 rank with nothing. why in the world would this be? i thought it was a bit strange. that's why i posted it here. can anyone care to take a guess?

@anwiiSearch result listings do vary by region - have you ever had somebody post a screenshot of the top 'n' results on a Google search result page and when you actually decided to try out the search, you had a different set of search results? Google does it as I've noticed the different in the Google search results. I can't really tell if Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo follow the same approach too.

Edited September 21, 2011 by anwiii (see edit history)