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
-
Steady decline since Panda 4.0 but struggling to identify cause (and solution!).
Hello I work as an in-house SEO (previously worked for an agency) for the website naturalworldsafaris.com. After a strong start to the year we were seeing really good growth but since Panda 4.0 was released we have been steadily declining. Our site has, I believe, good, unique content and is largely free of technical issues. I'm struggling to identify what exactly is the issue for the drop. We've had several key terms drop from the top half of page 1 to page 2 of the SERPS, such as the term "Borneo Holiday" (on a Google UK search). I don't believe we have any duplicate content issues. We've had a few external SEO specialists take a look and none have come up with anything new. Site speed has been flagged as a concern but when compared to our competitors in the SERPS we are consistently one of the faster sites so while we are looking to improve this, I don't feel it can be the only issue. Any suggestions as to what else we should be investigating next would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite0 -
By giving link do we lose our PageRank?
Hi moz fans,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
I'm asking this question because I've faced this (http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank)
Till now I know that when we link to a page we **don't **lose our PageRank, we just give a PageRank but not to lose it .
I mean let's say If we have a page PR 1, and another page B which is pagerank 0,
And If we give link a to page B from page A, At the end of the iteration, we have Page A PR 1 and Page B PR 0,85.
**But **he said above the link If we give a link to a page, it would result like this.
Page A PR 0,15 and Page B PR 0,85. Which one is true ?
Thank you!0 -
Panda 4.0 Update Affected Site - What should be a the minimum Code to Text Ratio we should aim for ?
Hi All, My eCommerce site got hit badly with the Panda 4.0 update so we have been doing some site auditing and analysis identifying issues which need addressing. We have thin/duplicate issues which I am quite sure was part of the reason we were affected by this even though we use rel=next and rel=prev along with having a separate view all page although we don't concanical tag to this page as I dont' think users would benefit from seeing to many items on one page. This led me to look at our Code to Content Ratio. We have now managed to increase it from 9% to approx 18-22% on popular pages by getting rid of unnecessary code etc. My question is , is there an ideal percentage the code to content ratio should be ?.. and what should I be aiming for ? Also any other Panda 4.0 advice would also be appreciated thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Was anyone hit by BOTH the 'Phantom' update as well as Penguin 2.0?
I'm interested to know if Phantom was just a "pre-Penguin" 2.0 or if it was a completely different update. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Community question- Penguin 2.0 link types?
What type of links do you think Penguin 2.0 targeted most - anchor text abuse , directory links, paid links, low quality guest posts, article directories etc????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
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 -
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 -
What causes internal pages to have a page rank of 0 if the home page is PR 5?
The home page PageRank is 5 but every single internal page is PR 0. Things I know I need to address each page has 300 links (Menu problem). Each article has 2-3 duplicates caused from the CMS working on this now. Has anyone else had this problem before? What things should I look out for to fix this issue. All internal linking is follow there is no page rank sculpting happening on the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBrent0