Page rank help

[Jayne]

Hi,

Been doing some more reading :D this time on adding pages, links and page ranking.

It says the more pages you have, the better rating you have. I didn't quite follow this....does it mean, say I clicked on my search button on my site and the search page comes up, is this another page? If I ad more sections to advertise in my web site, does this make more pages?

I'm going to need a bigger brain soon :lol:

Thanks

Jayne

[MinuWeb]

it means the more pages from other sites that link to your site the better.

[Ravenfire]

Dont make the mistake I did, I joined Link Metro and had an additional links section linked to my frontpage and I am convinced that is what made my PR drop (probably because some of the sites werent related to mine) as prior to that I was a steady 4 for months!!

[TechFox]

I'm going to need a bigger brain soon

Did you know there is a species of jellyfish that has four brains?

[Jayne]

Thanks Toni and Tony :D


And Mike, can you give me the number of one of those jellyfish, I may be able to borrow a couple of brains :lol:

Jayne

[DuaneJackson]

just to clarify something for you Jayne.

You will rank better in the search engines if you have more content & pages

Adding more business to your site wont create more pages in the eyes of google. This goes back to the querystring stuff I mentioned (the ? in the page address) that I mentioned to you a while ago.

If you had someone implement what I suggested, then yes - each new business would count as a new page.

[DuaneJackson]

For an example of what I mean, take a look at www.thesocialservice.com - click any of the links down the right hand side.... they all have querystrings in the address bar

Now go to www2.thesocialservice.com - virtually the same site, but no querystrings!

[epiphany]

Lots of pages with good content and lots of links to your site from other sites with content that is relevant to your business. It is that simple.

[webit]

just to clarify something for you Jayne.

You will rank better in the search engines if you have more content & pages

Adding more business to your site wont create more pages in the eyes of google. This goes back to the querystring stuff I mentioned (the ? in the page address) that I mentioned to you a while ago.

If you had someone implement what I suggested, then yes - each new business would count as a new page.

I'm not sure thats the case anymore with Google.

site:webit.net comes back with 17,500 pages (all with the ? parameter, thats why we've not changed it to SE friendly)

[DuaneJackson]

Google has always indexed qs'd pages, albeit slower than it does non-qs'd.

But a single page (ie: index.jsp) can only ever have 2 page ranks

1 without the qs (ie: index.jsp)
and 1 with the qs (ie: index.jsp?[anything]

So making them unique page names allows them to stand or fall by their own content. There are a dozen other reasons (but too early to go into them!).

We are still seeing a massive boost in performance on sites that have this implemented.

[multilingual]

Whenever I read an interesting article on a subject I always save it for later reference. I remember reading about query strings some time ago and decided to dig it out after reading this thread.

I am just putting this up for information purposes. I am no expert on the subject, but this is why I stayed away from using query strings:

This is a powerful technique, but it has a significant downside: it can keep your site from getting listed by search engines. Most search engine spiders refuse to follow links containing CGI query strings. Why? Because in the past query strings have caused problems for the search engines' spiders.

Search engines use spiders to index your Web site. When you submit your site, the search engine adds your home page to a list of URLs awaiting indexing. The search engine periodically sends out a series of spiders that work their way down this URL list, fetching each home page in turn. When your home page is fetched, the spider follows its links to crawl through the rest of your site.

To conserve computer resources, the search engine sends out a limited number of spiders. If something happens to tie one of those spiders up, the engine's ability to index the Web suffers.

That's why most search engine spiders avoid links with query strings. Query strings sometimes act as "spider traps." Badly written CGI programs or programs that expect the spider to pass additional information, such as a cookie, often trap the spider in an infinite loop where it requests the same page again and again.

To avoid any chance of this happening, most search engine spiders simply avoid any links containing a query string. If your site embeds query strings in links between pages, then there's a good chance the spider will index your home page, but skip all other pages in the site. That can dramatically reduce your visibility in the search engine.



Comments are welcomed.

:)

JB

[gary]

To avoid any chance of this happening, most search engine spiders simply avoid any links containing a query string. If your site embeds query strings in links between pages, then there's a good chance the spider will index your home page, but skip all other pages in the site. That can dramatically reduce your visibility in the search engine.

This may have been true a year or so ago but most search engines handle database driven sites quite easily now. Our entire site has query strings and all the pages are indexed. What is true however, is that you should remove session ID's for spiders - these are usually the long bits made up of numbers and letters that store information about your session while you're shopping for instance.

There are some who say that you should avoid more than two variables/query strings in a url, and Google seems to agree with this in their FAQs.

[gary]

Lots of pages with good content and lots of links to your site from other sites with content that is relevant to your business. It is that simple.

Spot on! Jayne, this is pretty much all you need to do - don't get bogged down in minor technical details, especially if you haven't done the basics yet.

[bitsnstuff]

I was sent this yesterday in a newsletter:-

You have probably noticed that Google is currently updating its ranking algorithm. This seems to be a major update because many webmasters have seen big changes in their rankings.
The PageRank of www.MSN.com dropped to PR2 in this latest update so there really seem to be some big changes in the new algorithm.

Google engineer Matt Cutts more or less declines that this is a big update in his blog:

"These days rather than having a large monolithic update, Google tends to have smaller (and more frequent) individual launches. [...]

My point is that more than ever, we are constantly working to improve our algorithms and scoring. Some changes are hardly noticed at all. Some changes (e.g. user interface improvements) are more visible. Some changes have nothing to do with spam [...] Some changes do try to decrease spam or increase core quality. [...]

And again, these PageRanks and backlinks have already been incorporated into scoring a while back (Google updates PageRank continually and continuously), but some people just love to look at PageRanks.)"

What has changed with this update?

Only Google's engineers know exactly what has been changed with this update. However, it seems that some factors seem to be important in this update:

Hidden text spam seems to be more penalized. While most search engines consider white text on white background spamming, it seems that Google now also recognizes text that is hidden in invisible CSS layers.

Links from automated link exchanges and text link advertising systems seem to count less.
As with every algorithm update, Google tries to remove the spam from its database with this update.

What should you do now?

First of all, don't panic. If your web site rankings have dropped, wait another week to make sure that the index update is over. If your web site is still not listed, take a look at what you might have done wrong.

If you use CSS to hide text on your web pages, consider removing that hidden text from your pages. Google doesn't seem to like that at all. If you use other techniques that might be considered spam, remove them from your pages.

If you have a links page, do not use a link exchange system with a central server but host your link pages on your own web site. Being part of a centralized system makes your web site vulnerable if the centralized system is considered spam.

After having removed the spam elements from your pages, do the following:

Optimize

Use IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to optimize your web pages for the new Google algorithm. The optimizer uses the current ranking algorithm to find out which web page elements Google wants to see on a web page for your keyword and your web site.


Diversify
We've said it before in this newsletter: don't put all eggs in one basket. Although it is very likely that you'll get high rankings on Google if you follow the tips above, you shouldn't focus on Google alone.

Yahoo and MSN can also bring you qualified traffic. These search engines might not be as popular as Google but they are large enough to bring you so many customers that you could even do without Google. The key to a successful online business is to get qualified traffic from all big search engines.

If you have web pages that are optimized for Google and Yahoo and MSN and Ask Jeeves then you won't get hurt so much when one of these search engines drops your rankings.

If your web site rankings on Google have dropped, don't panic and follow the tips above. Chances are good that you'll get your high rankings back.

If you worry about the dropped PageRank of your web site, you shouldn't care too much about it. If a major web site like www.MSN.com gets a PageRank of 2, the green bar shouldn't get too much attention.

Hope that helps a bit!

Kate :lol:

[Jayne]

Thank You everyone,

I'll probably have to read all these a few times before it all goes in, those links were great thanks Duane, I understand that bit now. :D

And thanks JB for that extra info', top bloke :D

And thanks for the less techy help, got about 90% of it, but that's good for me.

Jayne :D

[webit]

I think there may be other factors (Boardroom level) at play with the MSN page rank.

[Top Hat]

msn has a PR of 9 (and the .co.uk has 7)

Edit change the 2 to a 7 doh!

[webit]

Actually I've just noticed that http://www.msn.co.uk/ has a PR of 7!

Does this cast doubt on the big G's claims that PR is machine only and cant be tinkered with.

[DuaneJackson]

PR for a page can be differnet from one computer to the next

There are a number of differnet machines at google serving page rank requests and they are not always synched - especially when a dance is underway. There are ways of picking which machine at google serves your request but it gets technical (editing HOSTS file to hardcode the IP for toolbarqueries.google.com)

If you have a large number of URLs you need to check the page rank on you might want to try
http://www.keyone.co.uk/prreports.asp to automate it (free).

[broadband-engine]

Hi

Regarding the query string issue earlier in the thread, I went to alot of trouble mod_rewriting, but where query strings still exist the pages have been spidered pretty well. I have used google sitemaps so I think this has significantly aided spidering aswell.