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I was looking at this website other day: www.matieventi.com

Using Google toolbar I saw its HOME PAGE has a Google PR of 3, and its SERVIZI page (www.matieventi.com/exclusive-mati/) PR is 2. Nothing interesting about this.

Then I looked at the other main pages (Contatti, Hotels, etc) and surprisingly their PR was all 0 (Google toolbar shows grey bar 'No PageRank info' at all).

  • I thought: "well, they probably used nofollow/noindex to sculpt PR for those pages", but nothing, there is no nofollow/noindex in the source code of all pages.
  • I thought: "well probably links to those pages are not visible in source code, coz' created with some tricky Javascript", but nothing, links to those pages are visible with a clear written link in source code.

  • I thought: "well they probably removed those pages using robots.txt", but nothing www.matieventi.com/robots.txt allows everything. Moreover those pages are indexed in Google (for instance searching in Google for page 'Preventivi' shows that page is indexed).

    1. Do you think they did some PR scuplting in order to obtain this?

    2. Do you have an idea of what they did to obtain this?

P.S. plz avoid answers in the form: "you should not scuplt PR because this and that, blah, blah, ...", I know what Matt Cutts says on his blog, but I still see many people sculpting it at least for some pages, and Matt Cutts himself suggests to sculpt it for instance to avoid PR flow to a CART page in any ecommerce site, so it's not that clear. Anyway I'm not interested in these type of discussion/suggestions.

Thanks,

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1

There are a couple of different aspects to this issue.

  • The PR from the toolbar is usually the PR from 2-3 months ago. It is not kept up to date by Google externally. So are the pages new or have they been updated recently?
  • While some of the pages have some PR (2-3), Google has stated in the past that the PR is split between all links leaving the page. All of the pages with PR on this site have 15+ links leaving meaning you have to take the PR of the page and divide it by 15. Google also says you lose some amount of PR on every link out, roughly 10-15% according to Google. That means internal links from a page with PR of 3 give (3/15)*.9 = .18 PR. So if the only links to the pages with 0 PR are from a page with 2 PR and a page with 3 PR then we can assume those pages are receiving a PR of about .3 PR which isn't enough to show a PR of 1. There could be other pages I am missing with PR that internally link to the pages with 0 PR but probably not enough to get to one.
  • The pages with 0 PR in general have little to no descriptive text. The pages http://www.matieventi.com/ (PR 3) and http://www.matieventi.com/exclusive-mati/ (PR 2) both have paragraphs and/or lists that describe what the page is about. In contrast, http://www.matieventi.com/contatti/ and http://www.matieventi.com/category/hotels/ have almost no text on them at all and no PR. Google could look at this as a negative because they don't know what the page is about and so it gets no PR.
  • The only other factor is external links to the site and it is pretty clear the main page has at least some links. However, if the other pages have no links then this will also effect the PR.
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  • Very clever considerations, I wish I could upvote you more than 1. – Marco Demaio Sep 17 '10 at 15:35
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While there are a lot of other factors involved, the basic premise of PageRank is that pages are assigned a trust/relevance ranking based on the quality and quantity of other pages linking to them. Don't forget that those links can come from other sites as well. The simplest explanation is that those two pages are either the most popularly linked pages from other parties or they are where the site owners concentrated all their external link building efforts and the other pages simply don't merit that much attention.

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  • 1
    Re: "those links can come from other sites as well" - actually the majority of a page's PR will come from external links. – DisgruntledGoat Sep 17 '10 at 13:56
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Google probably just isn't publicly reporting those pages' PR in the toolbar. But that doesn't mean they don't have any yet. You just can't see it and won't until Google pushes out a toolbar update.

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  • Hmmm..., but the website has been up for so long, that it's strange Goggle did not pushed out the toolbar update fpr those pages yet. Moreover the pages were created probably all together, so it's strange that for some Google laready pushed out toolbar update nad for others not. – Marco Demaio Sep 17 '10 at 15:31
  • Every page has PR, even if that PR is so low it is essentially, and displayed as, zero. If the PR bar is grayed out either Google doesn't know the page exists or the toolbar has not been updated. In the big scheme of things updating the toolbar PR is probably just about at the bottom of Google's priority list. – John Conde♦ Sep 17 '10 at 16:45

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