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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
My "search visibility" went from 3% to 0% and I don't know why.
My search visibility on here went from 3.5% to 3.7% to 0% to 0.03% and now 0.05% in a matter of 1 month and I do not know why. I make changes every week to see if I can get higher on google results. I do well with one website which is for a medical office that has been open for years. This new one where the office has only been open a few months I am having trouble. We aren't getting calls like I am hoping we would. In fact the only one we did receive I believe is because we were closest to him in proximity on google maps. I am also having some trouble with the "Links" aspect of SEO. Everywhere I see to get linked it seems you have to pay. We are a medical office we aren't selling products so not many Blogs would want to talk about us. Any help that could assist me with getting a higher rank on google would be greatly appreciated. Also any help with getting the search visibility up would be great as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjaminleemd1 -
Penguin 4.0 and homepage level penalties
Hey folks Looking to get some input from what other people are seeing with Penguin 4.0 and historically penalised sites. We have three sites we are looking at currently - all had historically brutal penguin penalties. All have done extensive clean up and are respectable businesses and have seen some manor of recovery or improvement. However, we are seeing issues at a homepage level with these three sites in that the homepage currently does not rank for the main terms but an inner page does in it's place (but not as well as we would expect given everything else). This applies to a single keyword on all three of these sites - add a modifier to that keyword and they rank top of first page (often 1st place). Example of modifiers being 'installer', 'uk', 'supplier' etc. That main keyword though only ranks top of 3rd page in this instance and it is an inner page and not the homepage which is the best fit for the targeted term. Question Is anyone else seeing this? Sites that have gone from no visibility in top 50 for a previously abused term that are now seeing some visibility page 2 / page 3 for the big terms and top of page 1 visibility for those terms + modifiers. Thoughts This seems a bit odd to me and hard to understand in light of the Penguin 4.0 announcement if there is no demotion and only devaluation of bad links then why would a single page still be seemingly so heavily effected how can an algorithm that focuses on devaluation of bad links still be granular as this seems to be a penalty of sorts that effects a specific page for a specific keyword (the one most abused historically in terms of link building). two of these are big companies, biggest in their industry in the real world with lots of high visibility clients like TV shows, IKEA etc. Lots of natural highly authoritative links, good content etc - we are digging in further but certainly looks like they have their house largely in order. Note We have one other client that I believe is seeing something similar on an internal page and that page was the main link target for spammy links of old that are now removed. However, it appears Google has a memory regarding even these removed links. I mention this primarily as I don't believe this is homepage specific but rather that is the case as the homepage was the main link target historically. Summary These sites are seeing movement - huge movement. Not exactly what we would expect though given the extensive clean up and talk around how this release of the algorithm works. Be interested to see what you are seeing out there folks and if anyone has seen anything similar. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus0 -
Can You Help Confirming That 1stWebDesigner Was hit by Panda 4.0 and PayDay Loans 2.0,3.0?
Hello, really hoped for your feedback here. So my site is http://www.1stwebdesigner.com I just used http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ - and came to realization, that indeed we might have been hit by famous Panda 4.0 update. Here is screenshot from Barracuda tool - https://www.evernote.com/l/AELGaZ6nyxBE1aK7oQJVHBPKJuwjUh5JWk8 and in attachment there is Google Analytics screenshot for that time - especially May, 2014. Can you please help me confirm that we indeed have been hit with the Penalty? It has been 1.5 years already and since then, the traffic never has grown more. Before May, 2014 our site received 1.5 million pageviews/mo, after it..until this moment traffic has never been more than 600,000 pageviews/mo. Now if I look back even more with Barracuda tool, I can see it was also affected by Top Heavy 1.0 update,Thu Jan 19 2012. Even back then before all these updates site grew to 2.5 million pageviews/mo. What is the painful part I always focused on time-consuming link building. Submitting links to design news sites, leaving quality comments under related articles and always have written unique quality content on site for years. Can you tell based on screenshots and confirm we indeed have penalty. And maybe suggest what are the actions to take now? I have ahrefs pro subscription and started using Disavow tool to prepare for submission to Google. Would love to hear feedback on this..it has been painful throughout years. Update: here is one more screenshot from Barracuda looking from 2012 year to traffic - https://www.evernote.com/l/AEIX6iP4USBGtbyRLZ1oTmcACgBtXHBP2rw SpRPIyY
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | researchninja0 -
Website gone from PR 2 to PR 0
Hi guys! We're looking at a site in the trade industry here in Australia and it appears that around the Panda/Penguin updates in September & October last year, they've had their Google PageRank wiped out back to zero. I know we shouldn't be focusing too much on PR these days, but can't help but wonder what's caused this. It's a local business website who aren't selling links etc. I'm thinking backlinks pointing at the site that were giving them a boost have been discounted, however, they still have quite a number of quality links coming into them. Would love to pick your brains! Regards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WCR0 -
We haven been hit by penguin 2.0 what to do?
Hi, Last week we got hit bij penguin 2.0. Our sites dropped on most keywords on average 10 places. We had a steady place for 2 to 3 years. We have site-wide links in the top of our websites to the other websites ( about 9 e-commerce sites). Today i have put rel= "nofollow " tags in all these links (accept on the hompages). To prevent spammy links. Is there anything else we can do ? Url ww.klokkenpaleis.nl most important keyword = klokken ( previous position, 2nd place) search engine = google netherlands Thanks a lot for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTGshops0 -
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 -
"Too many links" - PageRank question
This question seems to come up a lot. 70 flat page site. For ease of navigation, I want to link every page to one-another. Pure CSS Dropdown menu with categories - each expanding to each of the subpage. Made, implemented, remade smartphone friendly. Hurray. I thought this was an SEO principle - ensuring good site navigation and good internal linking. Not forcing your users to hit "back". Not forcing your users to jump through hoops. But unless I've misread http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many then this is something that's indirectly penalised by Google because a site with 70 links from its homepage only lets each sub-page inherit 1/80th of its PageRank. Good site navigation vs your subpages are invisible on Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesFx0 -
The Site: search and Flow of PageRank
It is my understanding that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com the results are like every other SERP in that the most authoritative pages are ranked higher. So obviously I would expect my homepage to be first (in most cases), then followed by main category pages, etc. My question is has anybody ever seen disturbing results when doing this (i.e. pages that should have no authority outranking main category pages)? Is this always an issue with site structure or can you think of other factors that may cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | purch0