Hi, and welcome to part III of the ongoing debate, “Why the h*ll do some SEOmoz profiles have PR and others don’t?” If you are unfamiliar with this question, you read about parts I and II.
As an intro I would like to say that I was very glad to see all the discussion around this issue, but I was also intrigued not to see very clear answers from anyone. Sure, SEO is not a precise science, but I was hoping someone could have a better perception of what was going on.
The hypothesis
Some said that you needed a X number of links to score a PR and that the position of your comments was essential to getting PR.
Others suggested that having incoming links was all it takes. Probably even a mix of factors was in play.
Darren, on part II, suggested a lot of these factors, and gave more relevance to number of comments and external links.
I have PR on my profile page!
I was unconvinced that the number of comments had anything to do with getting PR. To get PR you need to be indexed, and have links pointing at your page. And since most (or even all) internal links in SEOmoz are nofollowed, you need at least one external link.
So I did just that. I linked to my profile from one of my personal blogs.
And in a couple weeks the page was indexed (no surprise there), but with a PR of 4! So is Google counting nofollow links for PR reason, if a page does finally get indexed? I know for sure that the external link was decisive, but that doesn’t explain why I go from zero to 4.
I guess we can put this to rest now. Comments and other links do play a role in this PR distribution, but only if your page is indexed – by then Google counts links, follow and nofollow, to compute toolbar PR.
Carfeu loves jogging and hunting bears (do the math). As a day job he’s the resident SEO/PPC master/apprentice at Search Marketing in Portugal.
