Formula to Increase PR?

[Grinderschool]

Bit more on the general issue straight from the horse's mouth (2009, but don't see why the fundamentals would have changed any)

PageRank sculpting

One thing I pulled from this article is that links that are in the navbar (so on every page) would get discounted heavily even for internal linking. Is there any software that will exam the link structure of a site to see if the structure is optimized?

The reason I mentioned the navbar because if its heavily discounted then any page with 0 outgoing links would reduce the overall PR of a site.

[pokeraussie]

More content = more overall site PR

Where did you read that? It's certainly not a very accurate statement if you haven't misinterpreted it. While new pages don't theoretically start at PR0 and a good internal link structure will help the flow of PR within your site, simply adding new pages won't have a noticeable effect on your overall PR. By far the biggest contributor to PR is external links, especially quality ones.

[Grinderschool]

From: webworkshop .net/pagerank.html (sorry can't post links yet) Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it.

Example 5: new pages

Adding new pages to a site is an important way of increasing a site's total PageRank because each new page will add an average of 1 to the total. Once the new pages have been added, their new PageRank can be channeled to the important pages.

Let's add 3 new pages to Example 3 [view]. Three new pages but they don't do anything for us yet. The small increase in the Total, and the new pages' 0.15, are unrealistic as we shall see. So let's link them into the site.

Link each of the new pages to the important page, page A [view]. Notice that the Total PageRank has doubled, from 3 (without the new pages) to 6. Notice also that page A's PageRank has almost doubled.

There is one thing wrong with this model. The new pages are orphans. They wouldn't get into Google's index, so they wouldn't add any PageRank to the site and they wouldn't pass any PageRank to page A. They each need to be linked to from at least one other page. If page A is the important page, the best page to put the links on is, surprisingly, page A [view]. You can play around with the links but, from page A's point of view, there isn't a better place for them.

It is not a good idea for one page to link to a large number of pages so, if you are adding many new pages, spread the links around. The chances are that there is more than one important page in a site, so it is usually suitable to spread the links to and from the new pages. You can use the calculator to experiment with mini-models of a site to find the best links that produce the best results for its important pages.

I believe I paraphrased it somewhat. You'd have to read the entire article to make sense of the numbers he used.

[pokeraussie]

Fair enough. Just don't think you can slap up some forum get thousands of pages indexed and you will magically get a PR6 it doesn't work like that. If anything, having that many pages with few incoming links is likely a spam signal that would be detrimental to rankings.

[parttimepoker]

I actually read the entire article again and I feel a better understanding of PR. More content = more overall site PR and with good link structures and incoming links = highPR.

This is a good way to think about building your website regardless of PR. Build sites so they make sense for users - and are of use to users - and good stuff follows (sometimes including PR).

[Grinderschool]

I agree, and in a sense in order for you to get the pagerank from your new forum pages they are going to have to be linked from and then link to pages on your site to increase the pagerank correctly. As from my understanding, the standard forums links such as any kind of header or nav bar becomes quickly ignored by google when counting pagerank.

So in order for your forums with a ton of indexed pages to be beneficial you'll have to go through and link to each new thread and then have a link from each thread to another page, and they will all have to be unique. That would be highly unlikely and seems like a total waste of time to do.

Fair enough. Just don't think you can slap up some forum get thousands of pages indexed and you will magically get a PR6 it doesn't work like that. If anything, having that many pages with few incoming links is likely a spam signal that would be detrimental to rankings.

[pokeraussie]

So in order for your forums with a ton of indexed pages to be beneficial you'll have to go through and link to each new thread and then have a link from each thread to another page, and they will all have to be unique. That would be highly unlikely and seems like a total waste of time to do.

Not really sure what you are alluding to by this. Most forum scripts will link to new threads in forums/sub-forums. Take a look at how FTP poker forums were doing it before it became a ghost town after BF. They posted up a sticky with guidelines on how members should create new threads. If you have user generated content with descriptive thread titles you will have a well oiled machine. You then have to determine the hierarchy of your site/pages, not every page on your site has the same importance. Once you determine that, then you can determine an optimal internal linking structure, and you certainly want to be linking to your important pages in the nav bar, both from a usability point of view and for good SEO.