I blogged awhile back about Google being less than excited about my blog. Since then, I’ve gotten some great advice, done some observation, and will continue to utilize my blog as an open mic as I hope to regain some respect in Google’s eyes. First things first-what’s with my incredibly disappearing PageRank?Maybe I’m overreacting to my loss of PageRank. To refresh everyone’s memories, I’ve lost my page rank for every page on my blog except my homepage, which, has the horrific rank of 2. It’s better than being blacklisted, but I’m certainly not on Google’s list of cool places to hang out. But, let me reiterate-although I’m in PageRank purgatory, I still receive the strong bulk of my traffic from Google. It’s not a lot of traffic, but the search traffic that I am receiving is highly relevant.For those of you that are new around the search engine landscape, here’s a bit on Page Rank straight from Google:
PageRank ExplainedPageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
Sounds like PageRank is the juice—I’ve gotta have it to drive relevant traffic to my blog, right? From everything I’ve read (including claims that PageRank is actually almost completely irrelevant) I’d say, yes, PageRank is still absolutely important, maybe it is just harder to determine what my PageRank is at this exact moment.Let’s back up. How does one arrive at knowing what PageRank is assigned to any given page on a web site? Like many online marketers out there, I use the Goolge Toolbar (or a Firefox or IE extension) which pings Google HQ and reports back the PageRank of the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This is where I’m getting the abysmal PageRanks for this blog. It’s straight from Google. I’m screwed, right? Maybe not. The quote below is allegedly straight from a Google Rep.
“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is forentertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers toaccess this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequentlybecause is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in theGoogle Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR ofzero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn’t beenupdated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the GoogleToolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results sothere is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If asite is showing up in the search results, it doesn’t not have a real PRof zero, the Toolbar is just out of date”
Too broadly paraphrase the Google Rep: don’t necessarily trust the PageRank indicator in your browser. Which, in my scenario, does feel right. Google has likely raised its eyebrows at me for moving the blog from a hosted Blogger to a hosted Wordpress blog—not because I went away from a Google product (although it did cross my mind), but because I made slight changes site-wide (including utilizing a completely different presentation template, changing the permalink structure, and moving pages—301′d or not… and I get a B- in that department, but that’s another story).For now, I’m going to move my PageRank concerns off the critical list. It would seem the PageRank tools are likely reporting well out-of-date data, so how much credence can I give it in the short-term anyway?The good news: Google reports that I’m indexed well. I am coming up in the search results. So, I’ll take that as a nod that things are OK for now. If things go south insofar as incoming traffic from Google, I’ll definitely reignite my concerns. There are, however, other things that come into play that can help my blog get more respect from Google. I’ll continue to blog about about this subject under the “Operation Gain Google Respect” heading and tag.
Tags: 404, Analytics, Content, Google, Online Marketing, Operation Gain Google Respect, PageRank, Search, Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized