Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have operated a content-based website for 18 months now. For the first year the site enjoyed a GPR of 5, but sometime in March 2008 (not October 07) my total GPR dropped to 3. After some research, I noticed that many of my content pages out side of the root were now receiving GPR0.
My site consists of 5000 pages (nearly all text with some images). Roughly 500 pages are our own unique content, while the other 4500 are comprised of affiliate news and press releases.
Nearly all outbound links receive the "nofollow" relation attribute. All ads use "nofollow".
I am confused, because the root URL has a GPR3 while the most popular content item on the site has a 0.
Please help. This site is now my only means of income.
[edited by: tedster at 8:33 pm (utc) on Aug. 21, 2008]
[edit reason] removed some specifics [/edit]
One of the primary practices for my site is exchanging news with backlinks. There are over 200K backlinks to my site, and I have over 5000 links out to affiliate sites.
1. Are you seeing a "white bar" PR zero (actually, it means "between zero and one") or a gray bar (that means "no data available"). If the toolbar is gray, then this thread may be of value: The Grey Bar PR0 Phenomenon [webmasterworld.com]
2. Since your income depends on the site, have you seen any drop in traffic? Often shifts of Toolbar Pr are not reflected in any change in ranking or search traffic.
3. You said "the other 4500 [pages] are comprised of affiliate news and press releases." Are these mostly the pages that are showing the PR problem on the toolbar?
I use many different tools to determine a pages GPR.
1) [a PR checking website and a firefox plugin for checking PR]
2) Traffic when the site had a GPR of 5 was around 120K unique per month with about 3000 pages of content, and now we are ranked with a GPR or 3 with 250K and 5000 pages of content.
3) Deep sub-pages are showing either 0 or N/A. Site root has a 3, most sub-sections have a 3 (five of the twelve have a 2), and most all of the individual content items (stories) have a 0 or N/A.
[edited by: tedster at 10:34 pm (utc) on Aug. 21, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed specifics [/edit]
That toolbar data is only refreshed about 4 times a year. The PR values that Google uses behind the scenes for ranking calculation is updated continually as Google crawls the web, finds new links and notices that old links are removed. It is much more refined than a basic 0-10 as well. For ranking purposes, Google carries the "real" PR calculations to many decimal places.
The public PR numbers change long after ranking problems have already appeared. There are many reasons that people see their PR numbers go down - this past update [webmasterworld.com] saw a lot of "down" reports.
Even if you are not engaged in selling or buying links, thee's always a chance that sites that link to you, or sites that link to sites that link to you, are. If PR is taken away anywhere in the chain, them lower amounts circulate to your site. Many people feel this is part of the reason so many sites saw their PR go down in July.
If you want to learn more about PageRank, there are some informative discussions in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.
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The traffic numbers you shared indicate no problem in overall traffic, but remember that unique visitors is not the same data as visitors coming from Google search.
Bottom line, it doesn't look like you have anything to worry about. In fact, the overall traffic growth you reported looks healthy. Stay focused on the really important metrics, and IMO PageRank is of minor importance. If your traffic maintains and grows, if you continue to see good ad impressions, or conversions - however your site is monetized - that's the key.
Thanks for your response.
Your total traffic does not enter into it, and neither does your Google Search traffic. The total number of urls on your site does not enter into it, except indirectly. Your keywords do not enter into it - PageRank is a "query independent" factor in the total ranking algorithm.
Even if the total links pointing to your site goes up, if the PageRank of those pages goes down, then their "vote" for your site has less power.
But NONE OF THAT MATTERS if Google continues to send you search traffic - and especially not when your search traffic is increasing. PageRank is one factor among a couple hundred in the total Google picture. It's a number that many people online have made a into a kind of fetish, but it's not all that. It has some importance in ranking, but just "some".
Let others have their fetish if they want to; just don't get caught up in the spell.
If you continue to build quality content for your site you will be rewarded with many visitors. Placing links on other sites is important but you always want to make sure that you place links on complimentary sites or you may end up with traffic that is useless to your sites needs and interests.
Don't get caught up with the pr of your site, just keep on trucking!
I think that I have discovered the reason for decline:
Google now lists only 361 backlinks from 18500 indexed sites.
My backlinks used to be almost 18K one year ago. Anyone have advice for that?
I cannot find a reliable back-link checker
Try Yahoo Site Explorer. It's been the most reliable for me.
My Yahoo inbound links number beyond 89,000. Google seems to be a very different story.
I always use Yahoo for link checking, Google unfortunately is not accurate.
This is a tought challenge, since there's no way of linking to all 5000 items from the home page. Are you suggesting that there would be some benefit from linking back to the site root from each item?
