It looks to me like google have now fallen into a quarterly first of the month update routine, I predict that the next PR update will be on July 1st, 2009. Let’s wait and see!

Happy to report that recently redesigned Lyrical Media has just gone up to a PR6 – my highest PR site ever!

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I think now though we’re seeing a stable and global PR update as I’ve seen pretty much all my sites change across the board, and the movement seems reasonable this time.

In case you hadn’t already noticed, EggRage has once again grown in strength and has this time moved up from its previous PR4 to its new PR5!

PS. Happy New Year!

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I started seeing a couple of sites change toolbar-pr last night, so I ran some tests on others and found some PR changes that weren’t yet showing up in the toolbars. Thismorning however, it seems that the toolbars have now updated fully (as far as I can tell).

All good news at this end, you may have noticed that EggRage has gone from a PR3 up to a PR4 now – which is always nice to see, and all our associated sites have all gone to PR3 or higher.

So go and check your PageRank and let me know if you went up or down!

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But Do You Actually?

Case in point: My beloved and most beautiful partner (because she might read this) runs a small independent film review website, where she takes on Hollywood actors, tears them down, slaps them about a little, and gives her honest opinion on their performances and the films as a whole.

She hasn’t posted much, but what she has written has been good, solid content with general good use of keywords, which are in this case actors’ names, film titles, and directors, etc.

Today I was having a look at her site to see if there were any new reviews to read

I shall not lie to my readers

Today I was having a look at my inbound links and noticed a PR2 referral coming in from ForgottenFilm, I thought that was a little strange, and probably a mistake – so I went to the site to investigate further. But no, no mistake had taken place accoring to my trusty Firefox plugins.

So, I decided that she must have some how obtained a rather superb link somewhere and I was determined to help her get some more poach the link location and crowbar in some of my own sites.

First I ran a LinkDiagnosis on the site, and this is what I got:

This is what I like to call “fucking nothing”. Nada.

I found a couple of PR-Nothing forum links, and a couple of utterly useless PR0 links from an old crap wordpress.com blog that I’ve had for ages. To clarify, she has a total of 5 inbound links, none of them with any PageRank.

Thinking that this was strange I delved into Yahoo! Site Explorer

Once again, a nice healthy dose of NOTHING.

Same links, no page rank.

So friends, foes, and family alike  – after all our collective whinging about how PR is obtained, how is it that a site with no links and an alexa rank of near 15million is able to grab a PR2 after less than 6 months of existance?

I mean I’d love to start sprouting conspiracy theories to do with Google’s new quality rating system and say that because the writing on her blog is of such high quality, she has benefitted from it. But I don’t honestly think that’s the case.

So what is it?

I’m stumped on this one, so give me a kick in the comments and tell me whats going on.

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So where do you start?

Well there are a number of ways that you can go about recovering, but most of them depend on how badly you’ve been affected.

If you’ve noticed a couple of pages drop positions then it may just be a general penalty. The first thing to do here is review your link strategy, do your best not to link to any sites more than 2 page ranks below you, and do not link to anything that is PR1 or lower. (The exception here is a PR of N/A as the site has not yet been through a PR update)

Once you’ve (hopefully) cleaned up your outbound links, you can apply for ‘reconsideration’ in your Google Webmaster Tools account in the form pictured below, whereby you promise to be a good boy/girl from now on.

If you’ve received a manual ban from Google, then it may be best to try the ditch ‘n dash method;

To do this you simply apply a 301 redirect from your site, to all your content on a new domain, this way you keep your PR and power, even your users – but your site is associated with a new domain and not affected by the ban. A word of warning though, if your site was manually banned, then it was for a reason… and Google will see straight through this old trick if you haven’t cleaned up your act!

What exactly is ‘cleaning up your act?’

Well, you’ve been penalised for a reason (intentional or otherwise) and you need to ensure that you not only resolve the initial issue, but also remove anything else on your site that is even slightly dubious.

Here are some points to get started with

• Key phrase saturation – check how many times you’re using key phrases throughout titles, descriptions, meta keywords, page copy, navigation, and baselinks. Too many = spam, and as you may have figured out, Google is not a fan of spam. You can use a keyword density checker to assess whether or not your site is overkill in the key phrase dept.
   
• Hidden elements – are you using css display:none on certain things? or matching any text to the background colour? (you have to be a really special kind of stupid to do that second one) Or maybe you think you’re being really clever by using javascript to mask certain elements of your site, or having different content served to bots vs users. You may think you’re tricking Google, but chances are that you’re really not. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, real SEO is not spam, and real SEO is not an attempt to trick search engines. So don’t do it!
   
• Inbound links – have you set up a massive network of sites (or social media platforms) that all link back to your site? If so, consider trimming that right down. Overkill on inbound links is the quickest (and most obvious) way to get yourself a penalty. Instead of trying to build thousand of backlinks yourself, write some decent content that people will WANT to link to.
   
• Outbound links – what sites are you linking to? If you’re linking to a site that has just received a PR penalty then it could well have filtered down to you. You need to be meticulous about only linking to high quality sites – as linking to a ‘questionable’ site can seriously damage your reputation amongst the Google spiders.
   
• Still confused? – If you still have no idea why this has happened and to your knowledge, your site is squeeky clean; review Google’s terms of use. They have some pretty detailed information as to what is and isn’t ok, and you should be able to get yourself going in the right direction.

And finally, if you’re still stuck – you’ve done everything you can think of and you still don’t know how to get out of this big hole that you’ve dug for yourself.. drop me a line in the comments and I’ll see if I can help.

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Google Page Rank is a very clever creature, it works on numerous algorithms that Google are happy to tell you about – provided you sign a contract agreeing to your instant death thereafter. A proposition that many webmasters tearing their hair out have probably considered quite seriously.
Page rank has the ability to make or break a site, good PR and it can give your indexed pages that extra bump they need to get into the top 5, and the maximum click through rate, while having poor PR can ensure that your competitors overtake you that bit more easily, and bump you down to page two; where the number of click throughs you’re likely to get is akin to the number of bikini clad supermodels you’re likely to get at the north pole.
That said however, PR is not the be all and end all of SEO, there is absolutely no point in focusing all your efforts on link building and PR campaigns if your meta content has not been optimised, or your site lacks decent content. Like anything else in the SEO world.. its just another one of the many bricks you need to lay to build your website big and strong.

From the previous article, we’ve established the basics of how page rank works, and as such I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions about how you can improve your page rank. Today, we look at how to avoid the penalties that we looked at in the last article too.

As mentioned, your PR is affected negatively if you are linking to sites of poor quality. This is not the only thing that it is affected by, but when it comes to PR penalties this is the most prominent cause.

The problem comes if you have a relatively big website, perhaps even a link directory – it becomes difficult to keep track of, and remember all the sites you link to, and check them on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are still of high quality and they haven’t slipped at all. Of course, there are dedicated content management systems that will take care of all your links and scan for reciprocal links back to you, page rank, and various other elements.. but these dedicated software solutions cost top dollar, and aren’t a generally suitable solution for the average webmaster.

Thankfully, there is a free alternative, which I discovered through SEOLand – ‘what is this free madness you speak of?!’ i hear you cry.

Read on.

The Bad-Neighborhood tool is a stunning little web application developed to solve the problem of keeping track of your outbound links. Essentially what the tool does, is scan your site for outbound links, then, when it finds them, it scans all those sites for dubious content, further outbound links, blatant spam, and keyword stuffing.

If it finds any of the elements listed above, it alerts you to where they are located, and where the link to that page is located. This way you can not only tell if you’re linking to poor quality sites, you can also tell if the sites you are linking to are linking to poor quality sites.

The results look like this

As you can see I’ve linked to flickr for one of my images (under the creative commons license) and because that page has a high density of hyperlinks in the page copy it has been marked as blog spam. You have to bare in mind that this tool uses relatively simple programming for analysing these pages, so of course it will sometimes flag up things as spam that aren’t. Use your common sense and you’ll be fine.

I find this tool an absolute joy to use, if you notice a drop in PR (in my experience) 9 times out of 10 it has something to do with one of the sites you link to, and this little tool highlights problems quickly and easily.

It should be noted however that while the tool produces good results, it does not go very deep into the site, so you may want to run the scan on you root domain, your blog, and large subcategories, etc.

Have you got a better tool? What do you think of this one?

Drop me a line in the comments!

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Page Rank operates on a scale of 0 – 10 and is basically an indicator of the ‘importance’ of your site in Google’s eyes. The next immediate questions, obviously, are how do you know what your page rank is, and how does Google determine whether or not your site is important?

Read on.

To find out what your page rank is (and everyone else’s) simply download the Google Toolbar for FireFox, or explore any other of the FireFox plugins that will do the same thing.

Your Page Rank is determined by a number of factors, the first and (to an extent) the most important of which, how many sites link to you. So, ebay, facebook, and myspace all have a pagerank of 7-9 because literally hundreds of thousands of sites link to them. A small (or new) site will likely only have a PR1 or 2, because it has not yet established many inbound links. Your ‘link popularity’ as discussed in my previous post about SEO Stat Packages, will give you a number, for how many sites are linking to you, and give you a comparison of other sites similar to yours and how you rank amongst them in terms of inbound links.

Now so far this sounds pretty basic, more links = more page rank, but it goes much deaper than just that little equation.

Page rank is passed on from site to site, so for example site1.com links to site2.com which links to site3.com

Site1.com has a PR7, so Google knows that this is an important site, because site1.com links to site2.com Google thinks site2.com is important too (ebay wouldn’t just link to any old little website, it links to other important sites like bbc and .gov websites). So if a PR7 site links to anther site, it passes on some of its PR. So site2.com which would ordinarily be a PR3 is boosted up to a PR5. Site2.com links to site3.com and puts it at a PR3.

But, if site2.com turns out to be a hacker/spammer website, using poor SEO techniques and Google finds out then it implements a penalty. Site2.com is marked as a dodgy site, and its PR is pretty much shot, but the buck doesn’t stop here, it affects the whole network. Site1.com is a big important site, and its linking to a bad site, this looks very bad, so it’s PR is also penalised and it drops to PR6. Similarly site3.com is no longer getting an inbound link from an important site, because as it turn out, site2.com is not an important site at all, so it no longer receives any PR benefit from site2.com and drops back down to a PR2 – but it is not penalised any further because it has not done anything wrong.

Obviously people have tried to cheat this system, building up high PR sites and then selling links to benefit other people’s PR, but as of December 2007 Google have penalised pretty much every paid directory out there.

It used to be the case that your home page was considered your primary source of PR, and generally PR would drop by one for each subdirectory/subcategory of the site, nowadays however, page rank is assigned very much on a page by page basis, and its not uncommon for a single page of a site to have higher PR than the root index.

Page Rank is updated sporadically, so don’t expect to see it change on a daily or even weekly basis – generally there are PR updates that happen every few months, but even then it can be questionable as to how many sites actually get an update.

Page Rank is a tricky beaver, but you definitely should not focus too much on it, many people try too hard to get a higher Page Rank, when in reality it isn’t affecting their rankings that much. PR is supposed to be a natural thing, thats how it was designed, so if you focus making the site as good as it can be, then people will naturally link to it, and you will see the benefits in your own PR.

What experience have you had with PR? Have I missed something major? Drop me a line in the comments!

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