Still Rotting in PageRank Purgatory
by Tony Hung on October 10, 2006
Yes, at times, it does feel a little warm in here, what with Deep Jive Interests dwelling in the firey furnace of page zero purgatory. [VANITY ALERT] At any rate, I thought it would be interesting to follow up on a previous post a few weeks ago, where I wrote a few scribbles on why this site had a page rank of zero. At the time, I naively thought:
However, the results of all of this are only “exported” infrquently — to the tune of once every three months or so.
The last update happened in the middle of July, so who knows how long the next export will take. Apparently, the longest it took to export their findings so that everyone could so “official results” , was almost 4 months!
Since my old site had a PR of 2 with absolutely no promotion whatsoever (maybe even “negative” promotion as I did try and hide it from Search engines), I am interested to see how things are over here now.
Well, in the time apart from blogging it seems like there WAS a PR update, and lo and behold — still a PR of zero.
What is Page Rank? Again, to quote myself:
For the uninitiated, pagerank is a way of Google to rank pages within your site, ascribing them a numerical value as a surrogate for worth. This is determined by a pagerank algorithm, but it is based on the number and quality of inbound links that point to a given page on your site; higher quality links are those that come from higher pagerank pages, and I think its also said that links which come from a main page of a site, are also worth more; also, links coming from a page that already has lots of links (such as a link farm) are not worth as much.
At any rate, I do know that I’ve achieved some interesting inbound links from sites that have a pretty robust page rank. Techmeme. The Blogging Times. Blog Herald. Bokardo. Calacanis.com and so on and so on.
And yet … still PR of 0 even though there’s been a pagerank update!
Grrrrrr! The utter frustation was so diabolical it in fact reassured me that that the warmth was not just my laptop overheating, but confirmation that, Yes, this site was still rotting in PR0 purgatory.
Well, I needed to talk to someone — and I found one willing guru: Kalena over at Jordan Consulting, who runs a delightful little blog called “Ask Kalena” at SearchEngineCollege.com.
After releasing my frustations, Kalena gently explained it thusly:
The answer is simple: Google’s Aging Delay for new sites. Best explanation is here: http://www.rightclickwebs.com/seo/google-aging.php. It can last up to 9 months, if any of my recent client sites are a good measure.
This is often incorrectly referred to as the Sandbox but the Google Sandbox is applied on sites that build links quickly rather than new sites. A good explanation of the difference between the two is here: http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12535.More info on both phenomenons can be seen here: http://www.searchenginecollege.com/hub/faq.php?cat_id=35. A good way to avoid the aging delay is explained here: http://www.rightclickwebs.com/seo/redirect.php.Nothing for it but to wait in limbo and work on your links while you wait.
Ok, couple of explanations:1) The old site content was actually on a sub-domain and that site would take it’s Google PR from the main domain http://thehungs.org. Although that site is password protected so it can’t be indexed by search engines – has it always been this way?2) The old domain was .org. Some people swear that .org and .gov sites are given a slight boost in the rankings and/or are not subject to Google’s aging delay. No idea if this is currently true.A final comment – If you have moved your blog to a permanent location, you should get rid of that old blog content or use Permanent Redirect 301s to point it to your new domain, because it may be considered duplicate content (same name, titles etc) and may be affecting your PR at the new site.
Quality guidelines – specific guidelines
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t send automated queries to Google.
- Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or ** domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
- Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
So while I agree, its less than 9 months old, and perhaps my old site was a .org I think the real culprit is my old blog. Which, as of later this evening, will be obliterated and transformed into a personal log, which is really what it was meant to be in the first place. ;)
Well, more updates to come as they come by in my quest for non-zero-dom. Many thanks to Kalena over at SearchEngineCollege, who answered my pathetic bleating quite promptly and competently as well. She certainly presents herself as advertises, and has a rare quality amongst bloggers: she actually replies to email. If any of you have any SEO related questions, please don’t hesitate to drop by her blog.
PS. The fascinating thing is in spite of my PR of zero, I still get a substantial amount of traffic through Google. More so than Yahoo or MSN. Go figure.
2 comments
Looking at it, it’s odd you didn’t get some sort of page rank in the last update, your technorati figures show 197 incoming links as I write this (but of course, the link rank which according to them isn’t broken, but it just shows the last 180 days shows 1 link..go figure). Only thing I can think of is possibly you’re sitting in a sandbox at Google somewhere, perhaps you can enlighten us on what sort of Google traffic you get. In the mean time, I’ve given you a sidebar link to help, and I’m sure other readers will be more than happy to give you a hand.
by Duncan on October 11, 2006 at 4:58 am. #
[...] Well, it can all be done with a simple plugin that I discovered yesterday, as I needed to obliterate the (probable) cause of this site’s PR0 — duplicate content at my old blog, as, of course, I am still dwelling in pagerank purgatory. [...]
by Deep Jive Interests » Wordpress Plugin Of The Day: Wordpress Suicide on October 11, 2006 at 8:13 am. #