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There’s an interesting thread at SearcheEngineWatch in the forums that discusses internal pages having a higher PageRank than the home page.

And, while this is not impossible, there could be many reasons for it to happen.

In this article, I look at some of the reasons why the internal pages of a site can have a higher PR value than the home page.

In my last article, I looked at some of the internal factors motivating PageRank inheritance.

For example, I showed in simple terms how PageRank works and how you can plot out the PageRank inheritance for a given site.

I also showed how breaks in the navigation can affect the flow of PR inheritance.

But, in this article, I decided to look at other external factors affecting the flow of PageRank.  It is generally these factors which have a greater influence on whether a page has a high or low PR.

While it is true that internal pages do impact a home page’s overall PR value, it is the quality and quantity of the external links which have the greatest impact.

It is sometimes confusing when you see something like this.  The site’s homepage has a PR 4 value (according to the toolbar) while an internal page which shouldn’t have any real value (such as a contact or about us page) has a PR 6.

It becomes even more confusing when you do a Google Backlink check only to find that the page with the higher PR actually has less links than the home page.

So why is it that the home page with more links has a lower PR than the deeper page with less (or no) links?

A lot of this has to do with the links themselves.

Ever since Google’s Florida Update, the engine has been endeavoring to improve search results by adding an element of relevancy to every query.

They’ve also applied these relevancy algorithms to the links which point to your site.  If you have a link from an irrelevant site the link should be worth less to you.

But that’s not all.  We’ve also seen cases where too many of these irrelevant links are actually harming a site.  The site with these links gets penalized because of the volume of non-relevant links.

And that is probably what happens in most cases where you see the homepage with a lower PR than internal pages.

How do you check this?

It takes a little investigative work to find out (a) if you have non-relevant links, and (b) if the site is being penalized for them.

The place you want to start your search is the source of the problem. Namely, Google.

You want to perform a few backlink checks on your site to get your bearings (so to speak).

Take a few pages where you know the PR value fluctuates and check their links.  Most likely you will find as I explained above – the link counts look right according to Google.  The home page should have more links than any internal pages.

Next, you want to take these same pages and use Yahoo!s Site Explorer to look at the links Yahoo! sees for the pages in question.

This is because if Google is actually penalizing you for links you shouldn’t have, then they won’t show those links in a back link check.  Yahoo! is much more forgiving and will show these links to you.

You can also use other engines like MSN to find these links.

You will want to look for links which are unrelated to your site.  In the example on SearchEngineWatch, the site had a lot of links from message boards and online guest books.

Not only that, but an analysis of these links seems to indicate that the person involved may have taken part in link spamming – embedding large volumes of links where they shouldn’t have.

These links are not relevant to the site, therefore Google didn’t count them.  But what’s worse is that this site has an extreme number of these types of links, therefore Google began penalizing the site for them.

This is a classic example of the type of link spamming that occurred early on when blogs came out – some shady SEO’s figured out they could spam the comments sections of blogs with hundreds of links and artificially inflate their link popularity overnight.

The engines soon caught on to this and began penalizing sites doing this type of thing; that is likely what has happened in this case.

The home page probably did have a high PageRank, which it transferred to the deeper pages, but then penalties were assessed because of the spam links which brought the home page PR down.

I would expect over time if those links aren’t removed that we’ll also see the internal PR values drop as they are adjusted to reflect the new home page PR.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.