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On the other hand there are at least two right ways to do this: 1. Be a Mega-site Mega-sites, like http://news.bbc.co.uk have tens or hundreds of editors writing new content – i.e. new pages - all day long! Each one of those pages has rich, worthwile content of its own and a link back to its parent or the home page! That's why the Home page Toolbar PR of these sites is 9/10 and the rest of us just get pushed lower and lower by comparison…
2. Give away something useful www.phpbb.com has a Toolbar PR of 8/10 (at the time of writing) and it has no big money or marketing behind it! How can this be? What the group has done is write a very useful bulletin board system that is becoming very popular on many websites. And at the bottom of every page, in every installation, is this HTML code: Powered by <a href="http://www.phpbb.com/" target="_blank">phpBB</a>The administrator of each installation can remove that link, but most don't because they want to return the favour… Can you imagine all those millions of pages giving a fraction of a vote to www.phpbb.com ? Wow!
A Discussion on Averages From the Brin and Page paper, the average Actual PR of all pages in the index is 1.0! So if you add pages to a site you're building the total PR will go up by 1.0 for each page (but only if you link the pages together so the equation can work), but the average will remain the same. If you want to concentrate the PR into one, or a few, pages then hierarchical linking will do that. If you want to average out the PR amongst the pages then "fully meshing" the site (lots of evenly distributed links) will do that - examples 5, 6, and 7 in my above. (NB. this is where Ridings' goes wrong, in his MiniRank model feedback loops will increase PR - indefinitely!) Getting inbound links to your site is the only way to increase your site's average PR. How that PR is distributed amongst the pages on your site depends on the details of your internal linking and which of your pages are linked to. If you give outbound links to other sites then your site's average PR will decrease (you're not keeping your vote "in house" as it were). Again the details of the decrease will depend on the details of the linking. Given that the average of every page is 1.0 we can see that for every site that has an actual ranking in the millions (and there are some!) there must be lots and lots of sites who's Actual PR is below 1.0 (particularly because the absolute lowest Actual PR available is (1 - d)). It may be that the Toolbar PR 1,2 correspond to Actual PR's lower than 1.0! E.g. the logbase for the Toolbar may be 10 but the Actual PR sequence could start quite low: 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1,000 etc... Finally PageRank is, in fact, very simple (apart from one scary looking formula). But when a simple calculation is applied hundreds (or billions) of times over the results can seem complicated. PageRank is also only part of the story about what results get displayed high up in a Google listing. For example there's some evidence to suggest that Google is paying a lot of attention these days to the text in a link's anchor when deciding the relevance of a target page – perhaps more so than the page's PR… PageRank is still part of the listings story though, so it's worth your while as a good designer to make sure you understand it correctly. Links
About the Author Ian Rogers first used the Internet in 1986 sending email on a University VAX machine! He first installed a webserver in 1990, taught himself HTML and perl CGI scripting. Since then he has been a Senior Research Fellow in User Interface Design and a consultant in Network Security and Database Backed Websites. He has had an informal interest in topology and the mathematics and behaviour of networks for years and has also been known to do a little Jive dancing.
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