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
-
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 -
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 -
Penguin 2.0 Recovery - Penguin Update Rerun yet or not
I have been hit by the penguin 2.0 update some five months back. I believe that I have an algorythmic penalty applied to my sites. While the work to cleanup etc has been done, there is certainly no recovery. I also notice a lack of recovery stories. In fact I think anyone affected cannot recover because a recalculation has not happened? Does anyone think that a recalculation of the penguin 2.0 penalties has happened? If so why do they think that.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jurnii0 -
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 -
No PageRank but good Moz stats?
Hi, Why would a website with good Moz stats such as DA/PA 45, mR/mT 5.0+ have 0 PageRank? Have these sites done something? I have seen some sites with similar Moz stats have PR3/4 and when I have checked a year later the PR has dropped to 0. Does that indicate Google has hit those sites and removed their PageRank? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
Why is this site have a PR 0 rank? Anyone can figure this out? LegionSafety.com
Our site dropped in PR and we haven't done anything and not sure why the drop. Anyone have any recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | legionsafety0
