Correlation between Page Rank of the Home Page and Internal Pages?

[KaranBatra]

I have noticed that Domains with high page rank for their home page also tend to have high page rank for their Internal Pages irrespective of the Quality of the Internal Pages

Is there any direct correlation between the "Page Rank of the Home Page" and "Page Rank of the Internal Pages" and, if Yes, then to what extent?

[RobertFisher]

Karan,

I would suggest that you may want to go back and take a look as if you believed it were just the opposite. When you see it as though there is no effect on inner page value does the change in perspective change what you see?

When you think about it, a highly ranked Home Page can be the result of popularity and strong content throughout a site. Such that, the content and popularity cause more people to go to that home page (an easy first thought is media like CNN.com). Because I know they have some news I like, I go to their home page first and most people will bookmark that page. By virtue of that, when I get there, I go to other pages on the site. (Note, some of these will have PR=1)

Now, if we take a look at a site that gets tons of pub when a business first opens or has a new offering and the home page is the target url, you will often see lots of lower ranked pages behind it. I have seen this a lot when a company is in a competitive space trying to catch up in some way and they do a big spend to drive traffic. They get an increase in Home PR, but as people go into the site they leave due to poor development, navigation issues, not what they were looking for, etc. The result is less internal pages with backlinks and/or traffic and subsequent lower rank.

If you look at mozRank which is a corollary to the SE algorithms, it shows this better IMHO. Such that, you will see Domains that rank highly (often because of history/longevity of domain causing more links, traffic to home page) along with Pages that out rank the home page, because they are getting more traffic/links, etc. than home page sometimes because site is newer and the traffic was developed to a specific product or service as opposed to the home page.

What one has to be careful of is that if you are trying to increase your page rank of your home page in order to affect the PR of the inner pages, are you losing valuable commercial traffic in the interim by not instead taking care of the money making pages? If you take care of them, the home page will gain naturally from the traffic due to human behavior like bookmarking, remembering the domain name url as opposed to the inner due to ease of shorter url, etc.

So, I can see how you would arrive at that assumption; however, I would recheck the premise.

Best to you on a great question.