Member Avatar for ncaditya

I have seen that pages inside gmail carry page rank. Does this imply that this page rank is fake? If it is genuine can it somehow be used to add to other site's PR?

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Short expert clarification tying the thread together: observed a Toolbar PageRank while inside Gmail, and the other replies are on the right track. As noted, the message body you see in webmail is usually assembled dynamically and is not the same as a public, crawlable static page. and correctly point out that the toolbar value is not a reliable signal for SEO decisions.

How PageRank actually matters: PageRank (the public toolbar metric) was a snapshot of link-based value computed from pages Google could crawl and index. If a URL is behind authentication, generated on-the-fly, blocked by robots.txt, or wrapped in redirects, Google cannot treat those visible links the same way it treats normal crawlable links — so they do not create usable link equity in the index. The toolbar number is also an older, delayed, and coarse-grained snapshot, not a live measure of ranking power.

A practical way to verify whether a specific page passes link value:

  • Ensure the page is publicly accessible without login and not blocked by robots.txt or meta noindex.
  • Put a unique, crawlable link from that page to a target test page you control (no rel="nofollow").
  • Use Google Search Console (URL Inspection) or wait for Google to index the source page and check whether the link is discovered.
  • Monitor the target page for indexing and any rank or traffic change over several weeks.

Bottom line: do not try to "mine" webmail for PageRank. If a toolbar shows a PR for a mail.google.com URL, it most likely reflects host-level/cached data or an internal snapshot rather than usable, crawlable links from individual messages. Focus link-building efforts on reputable, public pages that Google can crawl and index.

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Member Avatar for Dani

I'm really confused by your question. Pagerank is simply a very unreliable / "fake" / old data representation of how many other sites and webpages link to a particular page.

Member Avatar for jmorty732

I think what ncaditya was referring to was the fact that when on gmail, the toolbar shows a page rank. Mine says it is about a 2.

However looking at the source code of the page, the email is all pulled in through external functions. So I doubt highly that PR would pass through. Plus even if it did, I would imagine they would use the No follow tag to prevent any PR leakage.

Hope that helps!
Morty

Member Avatar for Dani

Oh I put no value in toolbar PR no matter what.

Member Avatar for stymiee

It's just the toolbar guessing. You see it happen on forum search pages all the time. I've seen forum search pages that were just created have a PR of 9. Those pages have no PR so I wouldn't worry about trying to capitalize on it.

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