Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil: More Google Pagerank Musings

Just a few musings about PageRank before I break for the day. It's been a good day's work, so I figure I've got a right to talk a little bull.

There's now two blogs similar to mine with a PageRank of 6, rather than 5. Well, there was, until I checked Not For Sheep, which on my bar has fallen to a PR5, and Serious Law Student, whose hopped up to PR6. So, the question becomes, what differentiates both blogs in their linking and link styles?

I'm not certain. Here's a couple of guesses:

Few Links, but Good Ones: Neither have exceptionally long blogrolls, and both link to sites which are authorities for those keywords. (For instance, SLS recently linked to Text Twist, a game which certainly owns that term. I wonder if there's some kind of balancing going on here: Google giving PR to sites whose links point to sites which are authorities for that term. I've not heard of that being done, but it's semi-plausible.

Fewer "Conversations": I like to link to folks engaged in various oddball discussions with me. Most of us--with the exception of Crescat--have PR5s. I wonder if this causes some kind of 'reciprocity' effect. I know that link reciprocity can result in the value of a particular link being lowered, but I'm unsure how it effects PageRank.

Aged Links, Google Likes Girls, Proper Goats Sacrificed Under the Right Full Moon, etc: To be honest, I really can't explain the SLS/NFS exceptions. There doesn't seem to be a reason for NFS to have fallen or SLS to have jumped up a notch. It could be both of them are borderline--PageRank probably has more gradations than show on the Toolbar--and so very small changes make a noticable difference. But for the moment, it really beats me.

Investigation continues...

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Giving The Devil His Due

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wow. just... wow. I have no idea how this GoogleRanking thing works... but i do know that Google cannot access my site. impressive.

Posted by: Katherine | April 24, 2004 9:44 AM

Very perceptive commentary. May I recommend you read this: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html#outbound_links Not very quantitative, but hopefully clears up some of your questions.

Posted by: Bateleur | April 24, 2004 10:05 AM

Fascinating, Bateleur. Now I know what I'll be kicking a couple of summer hours into. In the meantime, I suppose the advice would be not to link to folks, or use Javascript linking. Still, that's not going to happen, so maybe I settle for PR5. :)

Posted by: A. Rickey | April 24, 2004 11:51 AM

http://www.webmasterworld.com Really, all you need is there, they're obsessive, they're lots of them and they've been trying to reverse engineer Google for years.

Posted by: Martin | April 25, 2004 2:53 PM

I wouldn't worry about Pagerank "leakage". It is very overblown, and is not even proven to be a fact. Like everything else regarding the Google Mysteries, it's just an opinion. There won't be enough leak (if there is any) to drop a blog an entire PR point. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that freely linking out, especially to similarly themed blogs and sites, will enhance your Google search results, and won't harm your PageRank. BTW, PageRank is a sliding scale. The toolbar may say PR5, but in reality, it could be PR5.2 or PR5.8 or anywhere else along what is really a logorithmic continuum. It's harder to achieve the next level than each previous one. The scale is similar to the earthquake Richter Scale in that sense. For anyone looking for some PageRank basics, check out my article http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google/Google-PageRank-Primer/ at http://www.seochat.com The entire topic of Google PageRank is an interesting one, as there are many opinions as to its why's and wherefores. :-)

Posted by: Wayne Hurlbert | April 28, 2004 1:10 AM

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