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Why Has My Website Lost Pagerank? |
By:
Robin Porter |
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Why Has My Website Lost Pagerank?
Robin Porter
Many webmasters were up in arms back in October as Google seemingly reduced their Pagerank. This affected many millions of websites. Panic resulted as many webmasters were greatly concerned as to why this had happened and how they could restore their precious Pagerank back to their website.
So why did this happen?
First lets look at Pagerank and how it is calculated. Pagerank is widely believed to be calculated according to the number and quality of incoming links to a website. It's a complex formula that only Google knows, also taking into account the importance of the page that the link originates from. Pagerank is measured on a scale of 1 to 10 but it is not a linear scale ie getting from 8 to 9 is a lot, lot harder than getting from 7 to 8. It is also thought to include other factors such as the authority and trust of a website.
It is wrongly believed by many webmasters that Pagerank is the main critical factor that determines their search engine ranking positions ( SERPS). Realistically, there are a huge amount of factors that Google looks at to determine the SERPS, Pagerank is just one of them, however, it can be a deciding factor if all other things are equal.
Over the last few years the result has turned many webmasters into Pagerank junkies. They obsess about their Pagerank, about getting links from other sites with higher Pagerank and declining to link to sites with lower Pagerank etc etc. This has led to a whole industry of websites buying and selling links according to the Pagerank of the link page. And this is what has annoyed the sleeping dragon over at Google.
It has widely been reported that this readjustment of the Pagerank scores is due to Google penalising websites that are involved in the buying and selling of text links, with the sole aim of passing on Pagerank and hence improving their better SERPS.
Also it is suspected that sites have lost Pagerank due to bad linking, broken linking and other general errors. The thought behind this is to do with Trust and Authority - Google thinks that a site with broken links and links to "bad neighbourhoods" is not one that should get a high trust score.
Could this be the sole reason for the Pagerank readjustment?
It is improbable hat this was the main underlying reason, as a huge amount of sites were affected that were not involved in trading links. More likely, this was a complete overhaul or readjustments of the scoring system, resulting in a wholesale reassessment of site scores. The theory about the trading of links as the cause, is a theory that Google are likely only too happy to let us believe. It is a fact that they do not like the buying and selling of links for the purposes of increasing SERPS, so they're happy to let us think that they've applied penalties to this, in the hope that it will deter webmasters from doing this in future. In order to protect their secrets, the real reasons will probably never be known.
So how can you increase your sites Pagerank?
- Firstly you should continue to engage in an ongoing link building campaign, getting links from websites of a similar theme to yours. Do not get hung up about Pagerank.
- Steer clear of the dubious strategies that Google dislike such as buying and selling of text links. If you must buy text links, ensure the "no follow" tag is inserted in the link. That said, it is much safer to totally avoid them.
- Check your site for broken links - including links to other sites, and make sure you don't link to sites that may be considered bad - such as spammy sites and those involved in selling text links.
While there are many hypothesis and theories concerning Pagerank, the reality is it is not the "be all and end all". Just focus on optimising your site and getting incoming links, getting good content and applying a good relevant theme to your website and let everyone else pull their hair out about Pagerank. It just ain't that important.
Robin Porter is CEO of Arpey Internet a london web design company specialising in ecommerce web site design You can get a http://www.uberarticles.com/?id=15378&b=79 unique content version of this article.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article61847.html |
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