Does PageRank Equal Backlinks? Probably Not.
It is a common belief among SEO marketers that Google’s PageRank is defined solely by the number of backlinks a page has. There are reports though, that this is not the case.
There are several threads on Digital Point forum that suggest otherwise. The effect os observable when internal pages have a PR higher than the home page. A quick example:
the internal page with a PR of 4
and
Needless to say in this case the internal page has far fewer backlinks.
There are several possible explanations:
1) PageRank now weighs in the content of a page too in the calculations
2) PageRank gives more attention to the internal structure of a website and how pages are linked.
3) The order in which the search bot spiders a website has something to do with it and the last pages to be crawled are considered to have a higher number of internal backlinks. This could be tested by altering the order of pages in the Google sitemap facility.
4) PageRank is simply a big, fat pile of bull and can’t be taken seriously anymore.
I can make no definite answers here, but I will keep you posted if something new emerges.
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Pagerank is determined not by the amount of links a site has, but by the PR of the pages linking to that page. This is why people want to have high PR backlinks - because a high pr backlink will increase PR faster than 10 low pr backlinks. So not all links are created equal.
For the purposes of pagerank it doesn’t matter whether the page linking to another page is on the same website or not. So the internal link-profile of a website can be highly important.