Dissecting My Google Page Rank

After the recent revival of this site's Page Rank, I thought I'd take a peek under the blankets and see where the better ranked pages actually are. I figured it can't hurt for me to know which pages are well ranked and the details might help one of you learn a thing or two while we're at it.

The first thing I did was find a command line Page Rank tool: http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/PageRank/ fit the bill perfectly and is written in Perl, which only makes it more pleasant for me.. With just a moments editing I had that ready to run through 6,089 web pages here to see what their Google PR might be.., whoah, did I say 6,089? That might annoy Google if I just go grabbing the rank one after another. I scouted around the web a bit and found that Google is usually pretty tolerant, but sometimes they have slapped their tail at some annoying insect who dared ask too much too often.. so I put a seven second delay between requests. Let's see, that'll be, umm, 6,089 times 7 is 42,000 seconds and change, which is.. about 11 hours? No, too long - I'll cut the number down to about half.. cut out most of the /Bofcusm stuff.. that's unlikely to have much PR.. Yeah, sounds right.. let 'er rip.

We'll get to the breakdown in a sec or two, but first, my theory was that new pages wouldn't have any PR at all.. well, that was mostly true, but some very recent pages do have high PR. That surprised me.

First is the general breakdown: number of PR5's, PR4's etc. I don't know if this is good, bad, or typical because I've never seen anyone else break down their page data this way.

Frankly, some of the PR5 pages surprised me because I can't imagine what made them so linked to.. I'll list them here for your amusement and edification also..

Actually, there are a few others I had cut out of the list but noticed later: most were directory indexes like /Lighter and /Linux.

I don't know if that helps anyone or what it means, but there it is.

Comments /foo-web/dissecting_google_pr.html


Thu Jan 10 01:40:15 2008: Subject: http://www.movingtofreedom.org   ScottCarpenter
I think you can pass page rank to your own pages, so that pages linked from your front page tend to have higher page rank.



Thu Jan 10 10:14:10 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence
Yes, that's true, but notice what's missing: Tests have always been linked from every page through the same menus, but they don't have the a PR5.. so there's more to it than internal linking.



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