JeevesBond — Sat, 14 Jun 2003 15:23:04 +0000

IMO you are wrong fifeclub, I think you need to go back and try some different keywords, and make sure those stations are listing their addresses on their sites. If you have greater keyword density for the name of your city, you might come higher in the search.

Also check how the competitors sites are built, maybe they have half decent PageRank without even knowing it? If their sites rely on images or Flash they could have a good PR, but the Google bot wouldn't be able to parse the text on the page!

Moral of the story: Dig deeper and don't make assumptions

fifeclub — Sat, 14 Jun 2003 13:55:54 +0000

Well I'm not going to ignore it but I'm beginning to think that it really doesn't matter. Just look at the example I mentioned. We had a PR of zero and almos every competitor had a PR of 6, yet we always came out on the top of search results. So does PR even matter? Just my little experiment but I'm seeing that PR does not an affect on your search engine ranking.

The Webmistress — Sat, 14 Jun 2003 09:15:24 +0000

The toolbar, and use of it, doesn't affect PR at all!

At this present time PR & results are in a slate of flux as google is trying out various new algos and filters & swapping between it's different data-centres. If a site has a white bar with 0 PR showing on the toolbar it can be considered that the site has been penalised by google for some reason and this can affect rankings.

If you have a high PR then it means that the site may rank higher if it's optimised well as googlebot will crawl the site more often. High PR does not guarantee high rankings. Also a site which shows a low PR can still have rankings, but to show up high on a search will probably mean they are non competative keyword(s) or very specific search phrases.

PR is affected by links to your site & the PR of the sites linking to yours, however just because a site links to you that is a PR7 doesn't mean that your PR will go up because of it! PR also takes into account how many other sites that PR7 page is linking to, as the more links out from a page will dilute the PR transferred. The same can also be true if a site which has a white bar PR0 links to you it can be detramentle, so be careful who you swap links with.

There is a rumour that google is completely going to be changing the way PR is calculated with much more importance being placed on non-reciprocal links!!!

Still the most important thing for any site to get good rankings is a well optimised site, with good relevant content and no spamming techniques. Meta tags are still worth doing well although the meta keywords are less important - a good description is a must and the title is most important.

Katie_Venra — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 22:49:45 +0000

The pagerank system is a bit iffy at most times.

The way the toolbar works is a bit lopsided. All those people who installed the 'Advenced' toolbar are actually sending information to google each time they visit a website. So...

Site A and Site B both get 100 visits a day through google...

Site A has 10 users with the advenced toolbar who enterd the site via a google search...

Site B has 50 users with the advanced toolbar who entered the site via a google search...

Site B wins...even though they are getting the same amount of clicks FROM google but more people have entered that site through the toolbar.

Backward linking also helps a little in the page rank system as well. If you link to a site which has a HIGH page rank, and they link BACK to you then your own pagerank will jump up....if you have enough decent high pagerank links going back to you. The site i run doesnt. Most of them are not even scaled on pagerank, however i get about 1000 visits per day. About 80 of those hits are coming from google per day and i KNOW some of the users are using the toolbar. I get around another 50 odd coming from the DMOZ directory which google also uses, this bolsters the stats for the site i run and keeps my pagerank at an average of 5 to sometimes 6 depending on what kind of mood it's in.

Back links isnt everything

The FIRST priority has to be to get your front index.html page ruled under the SE standards...nice clean cut meta tags, good description and USE THE DOCUMENT TYPE LINE!!!!!!!

Go to DMOZ, get listed in there, wait 3 weeks, then go to google and submit the index.htm page.

Wait for a month and if you played your cards right and got the keywords bang on you should see your site with a pagerank of 3 or 4.

After that month change your meta tagging slightly, get 3 good links going back to your page which google has ranked at a 5 or a 6...wait another month and your own site should have bumped up to a page rank of 4 or 5. Then you let time take its course.

Thats what i done and it worked, the PR has constantly been at 5 or 6, never went under it, even when the site was down for 3 weeks and dopped from google's listing the following month when it came back after the server move the PR was at 6.

fifeclub — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 21:22:45 +0000

I've been reading a lot about it lately and it is very complicated... and secretive. That is a big part but not the only thing. In fact it isn't even the most important factor. And get this... reciprocal linking can actually hurt your pagerank. It's best if others link to you and you don't link back.

Here's a good link http://selfpromotion.com/ and if you really want your head to spin with overkill details and statistics try this one http://pr.efactory.de/

nerdbyte — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 20:57:18 +0000

i myself don't care what my page rank is i do care what placement i have for targeted keywords though.

zollet — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 20:21:51 +0000

If I'm not mistaking, the Google Page Rank goes by how many sites that have linked to you and what their PG is.