Hi,
First off, the actual methods used by GA are not published as such.
They have written a few papers on it, which I will post links for at
the bottom, and there have been several studies done by people like me
as to what is effective and what is not, and how the PageRank is
concluded and why. Be advised that the methods of PageRank sometimes
change and are tuned by Google to get the best results and at times
to combat those that are trying to "get away with things"
1. Internal links show up in "pages linking to" summaries for many
sites. Do internal links count toward page rank and if so, how?
Page Rank is based on three things. Internal Links, External Links and
Page Content. So yes, Internal links are definitely part of the
equation. Each page in the website is rated, not just the front page.
Links that are pointed to a single page show that the site itself
feels that this page is important to it internally, so chances are
that this page is going to have a higher PR than some of the others on
the site. Typically as you look down the directory tree in a site, you
will see the PR of the pages drop a single value for each level. A
good internal linking system will keep this from happening too much.
Having a higher PR for internal pages helps to get your site found
more often for different searches. I wrote this as part of an articale
not too long ago, and I'll paste it here.
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To get your Page Rank up you need to pay attention to the foundation
design of your website. The menu systems, links to internal pages from
front pages, from bottom tier pages back to higher levels, and several
other factors. We're going to go through some of that here.
On most sites, the first page, or the index.html page is going to have
the highest PR rating. This makes sense, it being out there getting
hit all the time, and if someone else is linking to you, its probably
that page, but you still need to watch how this happens to get the
best effect for your total site.
Lets say your site has three levels of pages. The first is the
Index.html, at the top of the pyramid. The next level is your About
Us, Contact, News, and Items for Sale, cover pages. The third level is
full story pages, product pages, and the more detailed info pages that
your site is offering.
In standard design, the top index page is going to link to the menu
pages, and then those main menu pages are going to link down to the
more detailed pages on the third level.
Let's give your site a Page Rank of 6 on the top level, the
index.html. This is a really good ranking by the way, this means lots
of websites like you and you are doing something right.
As the links happen, and we go down into your site, we'll see that the
second level pages have a rating of 5 on the PR bar. Going further
down to our product pages we see that these detail pages have a level
of 3, or even 2 on some of them.
This type of PR dilution makes since to the robots, but our bottom
layer pages is often where most of the details of our websites lie,
and the content that will bring into our site the web searcher looking
for information on the web. We want these pages to show up better on
the search engines and have higher page rankings themselves.
That these pages have poor PR doesn't necessarily mean that they will
not place well on the search listings, some place very well, but the
better rank they have, the better our whole site will place.
The guys over at Top Site Listings came up with a good checklist. I
don't know much about their company, but many of their articles are
sound in reason and accuracy. You might want to check them out.
* Make sure that your primary page(s), the index.htm page, links to
your secondary pages or secondary levels.
* Make sure that your secondary pages link to each other
* Link your secondary pages to the third level pages within their
sub-directory, sub-domain, or level
* Link the third level pages within each specific sub-directory or
sub-domain to each other.
* Link the third level pages back to the secondary page that it was
linked from
* Make sure that the there is not heavy linking between third level
pages
* Link to pages, regardless of level, that are relevant
* Link to pages, regardless of level, where the text on the page being
linked from is keyword specific to the page that you are linking to
* If there are fourth level pages, follow the same linking structure
that has been laid out in this checklist
Other reminders:
* Only link pages within your site that are relevant to each other
* Use keyword specific link text when linking between pages
* Use standard HREFs in links that are easy for the search engine
robots.
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2. Is there any relevance to the order of listings in a "pages linking
to" summary?
The listings on any search listing page is done by order of Page
Relevance, and not Page Rank. You can see this for yourself by pulling
up a listing and looking at the PageRank for each of the top 15
choices. Undoubtedly before too long you will see a page with a rank
of 4 listed higher than a page with a rank of 6 or 7. This is
confusing for many people because of a basic misunderstanding of what
PageRank is and how it is used by Google. The pages listed must also
have Relevance to the query, otherwise you get Amazon.com and Disney
at the top of every query you ask for. PageRank is used as well, when
the Page Relevance is equal, PageRank will decide who gets to be on
top.
3. I can't get a full list of links for a site, even after I click
"repeat the search with the omitted results included." (I only see 32
of the over 70 total links detected) Is there a way I can I get the
full list?
It is very possible that you will never get a full linking summary for
a site through Google. As I've said before, each page has it's own
PageRank, so pages, and links to pages with a PR of 0 or 1 and even
sometimes 2 (depending on the main site's PR) will not be indexed for
reference links.
4. Is any Page Rank “credit” given to click-throughs from Google
search results for a given search term (thereby possibly reinforcing
the position of pages that already rank highly)?
For this question I'm going to answer no.. not because of any
knowledge I have of the internal workings of Google, but simply
because of the code itself . Looking at a link on the Search Listing
for the titel of the page we see this as the <a> tag.
<a href=http://www.webadept.net/><b>WebAdept</b> Internet Software
Systems -- San Diego Web Design Web <b>...</b> </a>
As you can see, this is just a basic tag, it doesn't have a cgi or
even a javascript call included in it. There are methods that they
could use to gather what has been linked called from, but using
PageRank and Page Relevance they really don't require this input. On
the other hand, if you are using the Google Bar you can "vote" for a
page and say that it was a good find or a not so good find, and I'm
sure that this is recorded and used for Page Relevance, and possibly
even PageRank. But recording off the Listing page itself doesn't make
much since at all, as users are likely to click though several pages
and randomly choose listings that look good, just to come back and
choose something else.
I believe that Yahoo and Webcrawler have used this sort of thing, but
I believe they have both given that up (Yahoo has since the engine you
are using there now, is Google.).
Referance Links
Top Site Listings
http://www.topsitelistings.com/
Reasons your site may not be included
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1
Google Technology
://www.google.com/technology/
Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it
http://webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
Google Under the Scope
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm
PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web
http://hci.stanford.edu/~page/papers/pagerank/
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper-textual Web Search Engine
http://www-db.stanford.edu/%7Ebackrub/google.html
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/searches.html
Thanks,
webadept-ga |
