Strange PR change

[tommy]

I went to my site today to find that the index page has fallen to PR3 but all the other pages either 2 and 3 level from the home have have risen from a 0 to a 2 or a 1 to a 3 and even some 4's.

Any idea why this might of happened becasue I though that the homepage was the one that was always the Highest PR as it passed it through to the other pages via the links??

[Ozzy]

Google quite often carries out updates on their algorythms. It is most likely that they have changed the categorising of your website. I dont knjwo what inbound links you have, but Google would have reduced the importance of the "non-relevant" ones and increased the relevant ones. If you have a lot of non-relevant inbound links that would have caused your PR to drop.

[ARTzWeb.net]

Richard I disagree with what you state here. Non-relevant inbound links can't cause your site's ranking to drop. My website has maybe thousands of unrelevant ones from various websites.

What is important for google and the other major search engines is content and the way it is presented on each page. Check your page's title, first heading and first paragraph. Do they include your target keywords? Also are the keywords included on links from external sites?

Things like this you need to consider and then you will be getting a higher ranking.

Personally I have written several articles detailing all the marketing strategies you need to apply. If this is something that interests you, visit my Internet marketing articles (http://www.artzweb.net/internet-marketing/resources/index.php) for more info. (not trying to advertise, rather provide some insight which can help you get high rankings without paying a single penny).

[gary]

The general consensus from most top SEO commentators is that related inbound links are now valued more highly than unrelated inbound links, so if you run a cricket store and you have links from a cricket website, that's going to count a lot more than a link from a food website.

The whole PageRank system is a bit of a misnomer anyway as the rank you see on your Google toolbar is a few months old. Over the last few weeks there have been a few changes at Google and it looks like it still hasn't settled, so give it time.

Gary

[MikeH]

There has been continuous discussion over relevance recently. The strange thing is that every time someone mentions relevance they never back the argument up with empirical evidence.

HHmm, the jury is out.

[Ozzy]

To answer Mike's comment....

I once set a website up for myself and put a link from it to a number plate related website. My new website within 3 weeks ranked number 4 on google for search term "number plate". This to me implies that Google looks at websites that link to each other and deems them as relevant to each other.
Following on with that theory, if a website has a lot of links to and from it from different sectors websites then I would presume it would take the industry sector with the more volume of links and apply that.

Now, a few months ago there were rumours that Google owned some software that had intelligent enough AI to "understand" a website, and was able to read a website and understand what it was talking about to a degree and understand whether the sentences made sense or were spammy. If they made sense it worked out what search terms would be relative for that website and thus rank it.

Fact ... Google did buy out an AI Technology company, early last year or end 2003 I believe.

There has been dicussion on WebmasterWorld and SEOChat for many many months about the importance of relevant inbound links, and that they carry considerably more weight that "volume" generic links. It is believed to be the aim of Google to remove the element of link farming from SEO.

[MikeH]

I hope that they do come up with something Richard, the sooner the better. As we both know there are some very questionable tactics used by people to improve SERPS. I hope that people will eventually be able to demonstrate it though. Like you said, there is a lot of discussion, but that is it so far.

I think that the search engines could do with improving results, and given time I think they will. The only problem is that the SEO 'experts' will soon change to meet the new algo's.

Mike.

[Ozzy]

I for one don't disagree with what you say :)

[CLICK2]

Richard,

Thanks for your comments
Sorry - i moved the posting to here

http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=2290

before i read your post.

Regards