Pagerank 0
-
My website is around 2 years old and despite the fact the my site has 45,000 urls indexed and ranks highly for some competitive terms on Google, my pagerank is 0.
I appreciate that pagerank is not the be all and it would never have really concerned me, however around 1 month after the site was launched, it went up to PR1 before dropping to 0 on the next pagerank update where it has remained since (1.5 years later).
I haven't done any blackhat seo, nor would I have lost any good links at the time it dropped. The site is much more established and ranks well for quite a lot of terms so why is it still Pagerank 0? Could there be some sort of issue do you think?
Thanks
-
No problem.
-
Thank you Adam, much appreciated.
-
I'm sure you have many more links that OSE doesn't show. However, this is beside the point. Like I said previously, PR is a mathematical formula that depends on the PR of your linking pages. You may have many thousands of links but if they are all from pages with a PR of 0 or -1, then your PR will not improve. It's not just about the volume of links but the PR of those linking pages and the number of outbound links on those pages.
It is not unusual to see a drop in PR. Google has evolved over the years and the way it treats links has also evolved. It is likely that a number of the links you had when your site had a PR of 1 were treated differently by Google after an algo update and were therefore devalued.
Ultimately, you shouldn't be chasing PR and definitely you shouldn't be building links with the aim of increasing your PR. Focus instead on getting your site to rank well for the key terms that drive traffic to your site.
-
Thanks for the responses guys. Although the site is clearly in need of links, Open Site Explorer only shows a very small proportion of the links we have. Maybe 5% of what's in Webmaster tools. From what I've read on here it seems most people seem to have 40%+ shown in OSE, however it's much much lower than that for us.
Perhaps a lot of our links are quite deep links that Open Site Explorer hasn't managed to find however they are relevant links from sites in our niche so what I would consider relevant and high quality.
Sounds like from what you're saying, more links are needed anyway so I'll be focusing on that. That said, I still don't know why my page rank dropped from 0 as at the time it barely had any links at all and it has 10 times what it had then, very odd.
Also, the site has so much unique user generated content, I'm at a bit of a loss on how to make even more content that would be of use! I'm always getting linkback notification emails so I know there are loads of links, OSE just doesn't show them.
-
You are right that PR is not 'the be all'. You shouldn't worry too much about it and should really be focussing on other more important factors.
Pagerank (or PR) is really just a mathematical formula, which you can read more about here. In order to get a larger ranking, you essentially need links from pages with higher PR. For example, if you wanted to obtain a PR of 2 you would need 3 links from a PR3 page. You can find various charts around the web that highlight PR requirements.
Having looked at your site in opensiteexplorer.org, it is clear why your PR is not higher. Although you have over 1,500 links, these links are from only 12 different c-classes. This essentially means that you only realistically have 12 different links due to the way Google treats links from the same c-class. Also, as Darin has rightly pointed out, the majority of these links are pretty poor quality with not much PR themselves.
If you are adamant about improving your PR, you will need to obtain links from sites/pages with a higher PR. However, I wouldn't recommend adopting a strategy based on improving pagerank. You would be much better off improving the quality of your site with content that people find useful enough to link to.
-
Here is Matt Cutts on PageRank
-
I didn't do an entire site audit (obviously) but it looks like the links coming to your site are primarily directories. Your domain authority is 24 and your page authority is 34 for the home page. (I used SEOmoz's ToolBar for this) Remember, PR is a link analysis.
I would start a real quality linkbuilding campaign. Try to guest blog on some high ranking, high authority sites about any particular topic in the muscle building world. You can link back to your site from there. It takes time to earn that right but it is well worth it.
-
It's [URL Removed]
They are all 0, even the home page. Thank you very much for the help.
-
Can you provide URL so we can take a closer look?
What pages are page rank 0? Are all of them? If you have 45k urls then it sounds like your internal link structure may be weak. If you can post your URL we can go through it and take a look.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Penguin 3.0 hit caused by Pinterest?
I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. My URL is: http://www.weplann.comHello there,Since 10/24 we've seen a critical impact in organic results in our site. At first, only taking a look at the date of when it all started made us think about a Penguin 3.0 hit and then we went to take a look at our linking data to find we had more than 14,000 links from Pinterest (significantly more than any other source). Then, another thing that made us think about that dramatic organic drop is the anchor text: an exact match (www.weplann.com) is at #1 in our anchor text ranking but we're not 100% sure if this could affect our organic results because of the Penguin update.So our questions are:- A lot of Pinterest links could affect dramatically our organic results (understanding that Google may find that huge difference between linking sources as a bad practice)?- The anchor text exact match could really affect our ranking? If none of this points could cause that drop, then what would be causing it? We're sure it has to do with the Penguin update.Thank you very much in advance for your help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WePlann0 -
Product Pages & Panda 4.0
Greeting MOZ Community: I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Of the 600 pages, about 350 of the URLs are product pages, written about specific listings. The content on these pages is quite short, sometimes only 20 words. My ranking has dropped very much since mid-May, around the time of the new Panda update. I suspect it has something to do with the very short product pages, the 350 listing pages. What is the best way to deal with these pages so as to recover ranking. I am considering these options: 1. Setting them to "no-index". But I am concerned that removing product pages is sending the wrong message to Google. 2. Enhancing the content and making certain that each page has at least 150-200 words. Re-writing 350 listings would be a real project, but if necessary to recover I will bite the bullet. What is the best way to address this issue? I am very surprised that Google does not understand that product URLs can be very brief and yet have useful content. Information about a potential office rental that lists location, size, price per square foot is valuable to the visitor but can be very brief. Especially listings that change frequently. So I am surprised by the penalty. Would I be better off not having separate URLs for the listings, and for instance adding them as posts within building pages? Is having separate URLs for product pages with minimal content a bad idea from an SEO perspective? Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can recover from this latest Panda penalty? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Does Yahoo Directory Listing Pass Authority with PA:0 and 0 links from 0 Root Domains?
So we already have our brand listed in Yahoo Directory for a few years but today I noticed it is not listed in OSE and the pages we're listed on in Yahoo Dir are PA:0 / DA: 100 with 0 links from 0 Root Domains! (or with a PA:1) Does this mean no juice is being passed at all for this listing? Does it mean it is not even spidered by Google then as how can it be found if no inlinks? Does any authority still get passed from Yahoos domain with DA100 despite pages being PA0? I ask because I'm considering adding another company to Yahoo Dir to get some authority rather than traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Penguin 2.0 update, ranking dropped. Advice needed!
Hello After another penguin 2.0 update the website i've been working on dropped in rankings,some of keywords that i ranked in #1 are now on second and third page, you can see this screenshot here http://screencast.com/t/MramoXgTr 95% of my competitors were not even effected with this update at all, most of them don't even optimize their website for SEO, rather they use paid directories. First thing i did is analyzed my backing profile using OSE, to my surprise i found a lot of low quality domains pointing to my pages with a keyword in anchor text. A lot of them blog commenting and low quality article directories. Since i don't have control over these links and i cant remove them i used Disavow tool to do the job. For the past 3 months, i've been doing a lot of hight quality link building; such as
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KentR
press releases once in 2 months, squidoo lens and hubpages 3 posts a week for each keyword, youtube video, in fact my youtube video still ranks in #3 for high competitive search, i was involved in social media, posting tweets every week and Facebook posts. I really hope that someone can help me here with a good advice on getting my rankings back here's my website, let me know what do you think about it. Thank You0 -
How about a discussion on Penguin 2.0?
Penguin 2.0 was officially released today. I'm sure we've all seen Matt's video. http://searchengineland.com/penguin-4-with-penguin-2-0-generation-spam-fighting-is-now-live-160544 Ideas for building sharable, linkable content? New strategies? What to avoid, what not to do, etc? Let's get a discussion going!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
Sudden drop in PageRank to Unranked
Howdy, A clients website has just dismorning (8/FEB/13) gone from index page PR:4 to Unranked including all inner pages on the domain. There is no contact on GWT or penalty email from Google. All organic rankings seem to be fine, and i read about the GWT backlink glitch earlier. Should I expect the worst? Thanks.. Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webprolive0 -
How to Increase PageRank
Hi, My website has 0 page rank. How can I increase this? What are the different factors to increase page rank? My site is HomeEscapade.com Thanks in advance...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trigun0