Google Again!

[Ravenfire]

For some reason I have gone down today from a page rank 4 to a 3 on my Mumszone site today and I dont really know why. I have got more and better links on my site, I am now on DMOZ and google has been on and indexing my pages.

Would any of this be connected to my google ads account which has been cancelled due to someone apparently abusing the system (strange how it happened before a payment which has taken months and months of clicks and I have heard of this quite a lot on other sites lately as well).

Cant see any other explanation for why the front page of my site is a three yet some of the internal pages of my site are now a 4?

Any ideas please?

Thanks

[Jayne]

If I was google, i'd move you to top ranking...this google thing stinks!

Jayne :D

[Ravenfire]

Aww thanks Jayne. I just find it strange that other pages on my site are PR4 but the front page isnt!

[Jayne]

I don't totally understand it all, just thought it was bad what they did to you :D

Jayne

[Dread]

The google dance is underway and has been for a few days now. Its basically the BIG update on google that happens every 3 months. They update all the PR's and such.

Shame yours went down :( 5 of my sites went up, 3 stayed the same 1 went down. 4 of my on-going clients sites went up and 2 went down.

Generally a good result for me.

[Stephen]

To clarify, the 3 monthly update is the information that Google export (publish). It's not the internal ranking information they use; that's updated much more regularly apparently.

[Dread]

yeah, SERPs (search engine result pages) are updated a lot more often (daily? weekly?).

[Ravenfire]

why would your main page be changed to a 3 and other internal pages go to a 4?

[gary]

Just so you know, PageRank is pretty much irrelevant now, in fact it has been for a long time, so don't be too concerned about it. On top of that the rank you see on the toolbar for example is anything from 3-6 months old.

[autolycus]

PageRank is pretty much irrelevant now, in fact it has been for a long time

Do you have a source for that?

Dave.

[Alpha]

Just so you know, PageRank is pretty much irrelevant now, in fact it has been for a long time, so don't be too concerned about it. On top of that the rank you see on the toolbar for example is anything from 3-6 months old.

Must admit the team that does my website told me that about a month ago :D

[webit]

Displayed page rank is kept out of date. The other version and the one that powers Google is known as 'Real Pagerank' and is much harder to calculate. I do have an .xls document that shows how it works and what the real PR is for number of backlinks and average PR from those links (ie how many you need to get different PR's)

Found it:

http://www.sitepronews.com/pagerank.html

[gary]

PageRank is pretty much irrelevant now, in fact it has been for a long time

Do you have a source for that?

Dave.

Yes, pretty much everyone in the know about SEO! :) In fact in a recent interview by www.e-consultancy.com with Rand Fishkin (a very knowledgeable bloke at http://www.seomoz.org) he says the following:

Well, I'd say as of around January of 2004 it [PageRank] was more or less dead. PageRank in the Google toolbar or the directory is simply a measure of the global link popularity of a page; nothing more or less. Its accuracy is low because it's only updated once every 3-6 months.

PageRank was once important because global link popularity determined so much about a site's ranking in the search engines, but with more engines concentrating on finding on-topic links, evaluating links based on quality, trust and anchor text and ranking sites with so many other factors, PageRank is largely an SEO relic.

If you want to know more have a look at his site and at www.e-consultancy.com

This is echoed at just about every gathering of SEO's. The thing is there's no point worrying about PageRank - just focus on providing decent content on your website and it should start doing well. Eventually! ;)

[Ravenfire]

I must have missed that..lol ;)

[easy]

There - I kept quiet for the whole thread. Knew I could do it

Doh :evil:

[epiphany]

A lot of people talk a lot of crap about SEO so just because someone should know what they are talking about doesn't mean they do. The truth is no one really knows how relevant PR is except Google and I fail to see why they would keep updating it if it was indeed a relic .

From a basic point of view if you are trying to get your site higher than some other site on a Google search with the same search string that both sites have in the same places then a higher page rank = a higher position.

To me that is the whole point of PR, a tool to help Google display relevant results to searches; so I don't see why some people are saying it is useless.

SEO is a lot of guesswork and a lot of trial and error so I could be quite wrong but nothing I have seen so far has led me to believe PR is useless.

[kevin.xin]

no clue of that

[multilingual]

I am no SEO expert, I just learn enough to build my site and make it the best it can be.

But even someone with no knowledge can see that the major players on the internet all have PR8/9 and the crap pages at the end of the list have PR0/1.

If PR is irrelevant then why is this uniform across the web?

OK you might get the odd PR4 being infront of a PR5 in a search, but this can be for a variety of reasons. I have never come across a PR1 being above a PR8, so that little green line must have some relevance.

(Quite happy to be proved wrong though) :wink:

I will continue to look at the PR of my sites until google takes it away.

If it is not worth a carrot like some people say, then why is it there?

JB