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Who is responsible, I guess somehow the hype created by SEO firms?
A high PR on toolbar dose not always reflect a high ranking in SERPs, am I right with this? If yes, why so much importance to PR.
All my competitors that were lucky enough to have high ranks from the last update have been sitting pretty, doing absolutely no link-building or optimizations since the PR update nor the SERPS have been updated.
Me, on the other hand, I've been promoting and optimizing and researching and checking every single day for the last 2 months, and nary a result. I've been linkbuilding like crazy, but it's absolutely impossible to set up link exchanges because any new sites I launch have not had PR for over 3 months!
So the ONLY way to create incoming links (even relevent ones) is to pay for it. And I've been doing that for over 3 months now, with no results.
This is just blasphemous. I don't see the benefit of it, because it's not like everyone is being penalized evenly for this. New sites are being destroyed while older more established sites get to reap benefits, nearly cost free. It's getting expensive and I don't even think I can finance this lag if it continues for more months.
Google is supposed to like webmasters who work on their site
I'm certain they understand exactly, and I'm certain that is exactly why they are doing what they are doing.
They trashed up their results with fresh junk most of last year. Their current policies involving backlinks and especially pagerank are aimed at not overvaluing insta-sites.
On the one hand thay are basically overreacting to their poorly conceived previous policy. On another hand they are deliberately messing with the heads of less experienced webmasters who don't understand that the PR and backlink displays are not what matters, the actual PR and backlinks do.
The idea of removing the PR display is silly, just like not updating it for three months is silly. It does *nothing* to discourage the buying of PR, except among very inexperienced people who think the display makes the reality rather than the other way around.
Anyway. I quit soliciting links last year since I thought I had pretty much exhausted all the related sites out there.
I usually will get requests for links (about 3 or 4 a week) and I will reciprocate if the site is related.
A few weeks ago I changed the name of the links page to something other then links.html. Of course I lost my page rank. I really didn't care. The site is still #1. But I got this email from someone who wanted to exchange links and he was questioning me on why my PR for the link page was 0 (not blank but 0). I told him that I changed the name of the page. I also explained to him that the site is #1 and to give the page a month or 2 to get the PR back. Funny, he decided not to link to me.
Too bad. It seems that the novice and new webmasters out there are placing way too much importance on that green bar. I would have gladly exchanged links with this guy, but I now consider it his loss.
I bet in a month or two, my links page will be back to PR 5 which is where the old one was.
Anyway... just a story. There can be mitigating circumstances as to why a page doesn't show PR.
I must admit checking back links was a part of my SEO monitoring habits, and I feel a real loss without it. Not being able to know any sites PR would really add to that lack of quick insight. I really would not be surprised if they get rid of the bar display on the tool. 99.9% of Google users have no idea what it is, and the rest use it for SEO
Options + Page Info Menu
On another hand they are deliberately messing with the heads of less experienced webmasters who don't understand that the PR and backlink displays are not what matters, the actual PR and backlinks do.
I'd argue that the displayed pagerank does matter - not for the serps, but for facilitating link exchanges etc., where an indicated PR0 can be a pretty big handicap.
I decided to buy advertising on a thematically related PR7 website to draw some traffic and help boost my own site's initial PR in it's infancy. From what I have been told by reputable SEO's, this is acceptable practice if you are also link building.
Now, I find this forum (which is great by the way), and I've been reading in some posts that Google may be penalizing sites who are buying text ads on high PR sites. (Maybe I don't have this exactly correct, so someone help me out if I need to be set straight.) I'm pretty blown away by that. I am someone who is using "best practices", (thematic linking, quality content, no cloaking, no hidden text, no doorway pages, etc.) I'm playing by the rules, but now I have to worry that it's wrong to get an inital boost in PR so that I can have more success at a link building campaign?
It's a harsh world when you have to have PR to get PR but you have no PR.
All they will do (most likely) is de-valuate:
1. Irrelevent links
2. Links from the bottom of pages
3. Links surrounded by other irrelevent links
4. Lots of links to sites that are very new
Which, in both our cases, is not a very attractive thing to see since we don't really have much choice in the matter.
Thanks for the clarification on the Google's most likely treatment of linking. If that's the case, I think if I (or we) stick to relevant linking (for both paid and free) we will be fine. I'd just like to get some traffic going to start to pay back my advertising budget!
Below this level, production setup costs each week actually override the revenue generated.
So I am in a doubly bad situation because not only am I desperately trying to promote this site with little to no effect (except word of mouth), but I am also investing in the production costs, both of which are yielding a negative net profit.
Deep down I think we all know what Google have done to professional SEO's over the past 10 months.
The problem is their current approach doesn't just mess with "SEO" types, it causes major grief for small business people whose only desire is to compete on even ground with the rest of the world. Its tough enough to start a new business without Google tieing your hands behind your back with several months of displayed PR0 for newer pages.
I have a site that was PR 6 in May (now PR 5). All other pages had a uniform distribution of PR down to PR 3.
Coincidentally my server was down twice during two Google crawls (not in between, 99.9% uptime). About 13 of my pages were missed twice by Google so they dropped out of the index for a month. Several other pages were missed once and for a month were partially indexed (Google term), I call it "in Limbo", only the URL of the page shows no Title or description. All pages are now indexed and have been indexed for numerous crawls since. This event perhaps could have triggered a Google spam filter at the time. A filter to catch website owners trying to get a "new page" advantage forever.
The point:
The pages that were missed twice are now indexed at PR 0. These 13 pages had PR 3 or PR 4. Their positioning in the SERPS for their keywords went from 30 to 40 to 300 to 400 and have remained that way to this day.
High PR doesn't mean much in SERPs; PR 0 can do some harm. I've discussed this with Google, at first they didn't understand. The second discussion (email) they at least understood but provided the standard placations, content and backlinks to improve PR.
These pages are clean, had PR 3 or 4, and ranked OK in SERPS before the server down coincidence.
Hang in there! That's all we can do.
This illustrates what a broad hammer Google has been forced to use to combat spam.. they must be desperate. Hopefully they can refine the hammer a bit - the way things are now its causing a lot of grief for innocent webmasters who are just trying to play by the rules.
But of course if it lasts until the 4 month mark then that's when we would have expected at least 2 updates in that time so the delay won't be doing anyone any favors.
I'm definitely getting tired of checking every day for an update and being disappointed.
-Nuttzy
the 23 september will be three months! i hope to see some green pixel dancing before october! :) i lost a lot of money in link-buying campaing in this months..
Increase our pagerank or update it.. isn't too much important if this will be on the toolbar or not.. but just update it! UPPPPDDAAAATTTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE (i'm going crazy)
For one site, I completely rebuilt everything 3 months ago, and converted it to PHP, moving off of Yahoo hosting. Now ALL pages (except the homepage) have zero pagerank and the customer stopped getting orders even though they have 100s of new content pages, a better navigation structure and more sites linking to them. It's been 3 months and they are ready to replace me.
Google I say to you: If you motto is "Do no evil", I can tell you that doing nothing is causing a lot of honest hard working folk a lot of problems.
Yeah, what a bummer to be up 27 points in under a month.
