Homepage with a lower PR?

[VinceWicks]

Can anybody give me an example of 2-4 sites that have lower PR on the homepage and a higher PR on secondary pages (about us, etc)?

And is there a way to search for such sites in Google?

Thanks

[jenmcardle]

Hi Vince.

What exactly do you mean by "PR"? Google internally uses PageRank as one of over 200 metrics when evaluating a page's placement in results. Google does not make that information available except for 3-4 times per year. PR has almost no value in daily SEO, even Google clearly and repeatedly has stated such. You may wish to read Susan Moskwa's discussion of this topic along with her advice to not use PR as a metric for evaluating websites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/beyond-pagerank-graduating-to.html

One possible scenario where a website could have an internal page rank higher then the home page would be if the site performed an important interview. For example if a local website conducted an interview with the Vice-President, then the internal page which offered that article could receive coverage and links from hundreds of important sources around the country. The PR value of that page can then exceed the home page.

For an actual example, the best I can offer is using SEOmoz Page Authority (PA). A company called Screaming Frog offers SEO services but they are most famous for creating a web crawler. Their home page (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/) has a PA of 57. The screaming frog crawler page (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) has a PA of 62.

I hope this helps.

** Edited reply based on feedback from Keri

[VinceWicks]

Thanks a lot for your exhasting reply, but could you give me an example of say 3 sites with the following situation (or similoar). A site has a menu with the following buttons (links) to respective pages:

Home - PR3

About us - PR4

Services - PR5

Contact us - PR4

So, the home page is the weakest in terms of PR values.

Thanks in advance.

[jenmcardle]

Even if we use PA instead of PR, I am confident there is not any site which matches the pattern you described. It could be done on a test site by intentionally manipulating the links, but it would take a lot of effort. The example you shared is not realistically going to exist.

There may be sites with various internal pages which PR higher then the home page, but there are not a significant amount of links earned by support pages such as "Contact Us" or "About Us" on most websites. There can be rare exceptions but not one where all the conditions you described exist.

[VinceWicks]

Thanks for the answer, but as far as I know every single page has its own PR. Isn't that right?

[jenmcardle]

Yes, each page has it's own PR.

[KeriMorgret]

I remember several years ago working on a site for my brother, and we did actually have a higher toolbar page rank on a couple of interior pages than we did on the home page. I don't know how you would search for that or why you would want to, however.

I can tell you how I believe it happened to this site. My brother had had a personal site that evolved into a business site. He kept his product information on that personal site, and had an oscommerce store set up on the business domain in a subfolder. For years, the home page was just a placeholder, or even a redirect to the subfolder (I can't remember which).

We took the business portions of the personal site and redirected them to the appropriate pages and subfolders on the business site. For a while, those pages and subfolders had a higher toolbar PR than the homepage itself did. People linked directly to those product and category pages, and there was the redirect from the personal site, yet the home page had little attention.