Analysis of Google PageRank Assignment

In the SEO community there is a lot of attention paid to PageRank as an indicator of a domain's value. Although it is one of the most important aspects of a domain's value in the eyes of Google, there are a few details that should be mentioned.
First of all, for anyone who doesn't know what PageRank is - it is a metric used by Google to determine how important a domain is based on analysis of link on the internet. Google gives each page on the internet a weight and when one page links to another it passes some value onto the page it is linking to. This is true for both external and internal hyperlinks. Google PageRank has eleven scores, between 1 and 10. The higher the PageRank, the more likely Google is to trust it. Pages that don't have any PageRank are often referred to as having N/A PageRank.
When it come to sub-pages, the time Google has known about them is a factor in PageRank assignment. When new sites first get assigned PageRank their sub-pages often remain without any PageRank. In general, sub-pages are a little slow to get give PageRank. Google is generally less trusting of sub-pages unless they belong to a trusted domain. In particular websites with a lot of sub-pages and even more so sites that link to a lot of internal pages (like directories) can struggle to pass their PageRank to internal pages.
Some suggest that the text content of the page affects PageRank assignment, but this doesn't seem to be the case. There is no evidence that text affects PageRank other than pages that have been spammed often have their PageRank reduced.
Google can and do manipulate websites' PageRank. This is generally as a penalty for sites that have used unhonest practices. This can often cause all the site's sub-pages to loose their PageRank. It has also been claimed that in the past Google has made mistakes in PageRank updates.
The structure of the site has a major role to play in the assignment of PageRank. Google uses what is known as block level analysis to analyses web pages. They use their knowledge of the structure of the web to decide what links on a page are probably the most important and the pages these links point to are more likely to receive PageRank.
Probably the most important factor in the assignment of PageRank to a web page is the PageRank of the web pages linking to it. The higher the PageRank of pages linking to a given page, the higher its PageRank is likely to be. PageRank is generally not assigned to a page higher than the pages that link to it. So, if a web page has 4 PageRank 4 and 3 PageRank 3 links pointing at it, it will probably be give a PageRank of 4. Also, pages that have a lot of low PageRank and PageRank N/A hyperlinks pointing to them can have their PageRank lowered as a result. The sheer quantity of links does not help to increase PageRank. A website can have a high PageRank with relatively few links pointing to it if those links are of a high PageRank.
Finally, the PageRank of a web page may change even when there has been no change in the hyperlinks pointing to that page. This is either due to changes in the structure of links between all websites or adjustments made by Google.

SEO Articles: http://www.internetionalmedia.com/Category/SEO/

Sky Alfaro is an SEO consultant with SEM Labs where she helps small to medium sized companies with SEO training.

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