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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.

First of all, let me say that this isn’t an uncommon thing.  While it is rare, it’s not really surprising.  In fact, many factors will contribute to a site’s PageRank value.  These same factors effect PR on internal pages as well.

Let’s start with some basics.  Relevancy algorithms aside, PageRank is a numbers game.  If page “A” has three PageRank 5 links and page “B” has two PageRank 5 links then page “A” will outrank page “B”.

Of course, you have to slice and dice the inheritance value to get the true PR inheritance, but at its essence that is what PageRank is.  So let’s make it a little more advanced.

Let’s say the same two pages have the same values.  However, on two of page “A”s backlinks, there are a large number of outbound links.  Let’s say there are ten links.  Now, each of those ten links share a portion of the PageRank value. 

Now, instead of page “A” inheriting all of the PR 5 value, it’s inheriting ½ of a point of the value.  In other words, you take 5 (the PR value) and divide by 10 (the number of links) to come up with .5.  That means the page now isn’t earning a 5 but a .5.  If two of those pages have similar outbound links then between the two pages the site earns 1 (.5 + .5) where previously it earned 10 (5 + 5). 

Now, when you combine the values of the three pages (.5 + .5 + 5) Page “A” only earns a 6. If nothing changes with page “B” then it still earns 10 which means it now outranks page “A”.

Keep in mind that I am drastically oversimplifying how PageRank works but this is essentially it.  You take the number of links and share the PR value among them.  This is why you sometimes hear that a link from a PR 4 page with 10 outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR 8 page with 100 outbound links.  If you do the math as I just did you’d see that the PR4 link is worth 0.4 while the PR8 link is only worth 0.08.

So, with this very basic understanding of PageRank, let’s look at the original problem:  How is it that internal pages have a higher PR value than the home page?

In order to do that, we’d need to look at the site in question.  It is possible that there are very few internal links pointing back to the home page.  Therefore, any internal PR earned wouldn’t fully transfer to the home page.

Or, if the path from a deep high PR path is convoluted (in other words, no direct link back to the home page, PR inheritance has to travel through 3 or 4 pages to get to the home) the PR inheritance from the high PR deep page becomes diluted.

Here’s another way to look at it.  Put a dot on a piece of paper.  Now put 2 or 3 below it, and then 5 to 8 below that.  Keep increasing the number of dots as you move lower.  Notice that you are forming a pyramid.  This is how your typical site is organized.  At the top of the pyramid is your home page, while your product pages are generally the bottom level.

Now, draw lines from the lower to upper level pages.  You can also draw lines between pages.  Try to ensure that not all pages are joined to ones beside it or above it, so that there are obvious areas where there is no relationship.

These lines you’ve just drawn are the links between pages.  They are also the way that PageRank gets transferred from page to page within the site.

If you have a popular product in that product level, there’s a good chance it will have a lot of good links pointing to it from outside sources.  But what if there isn’t a clear path back to upper level pages?

Look at your drawing, do you see how this could happen?  There are places on the pyramid where pages aren’t joined via lines, or links, therefore there’s no way for the lower page to transfer PR to the upper page.

The more lines or links the PR has to follow to get to the home page, the more diluted that PR value becomes as each other page takes its share of the PR value.

It truly is like a pyramid scheme.  The only way the top level can make the most money (or in this case earn the most PageRank) is to ensure that all the levels below it are working together.  If there’s a break then the top doesn’t earn its full potential.  And this is why internal site architecture is so important.

There are other reasons why an internal page would have a higher PageRank; I’ll get into those in the next article.

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.