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I have been employed to upgrade an existing clients website. I did some research on how they were going on the search engines. It appears very well. The person who was employed before me as done a good job. It is ranked number one on most se's including Google for pretty much all the terms that are required.
But there are a number of interesting things I have found.
1) It has a page rank of 5, but there are only two links to it. One from ODP and one from Yahoo. This shows the importance of these two pages.
2) The person has submitted a page to these directories that is not actually the root page, and they have indexed it.
[example.com.au...]
3) It has a meta refresh of 0.
This kind of goes against those little rules I have in my head about Google.
Has anyone had any similar situations, or is this just a freak of Google.
[edited by: Marcia at 2:32 am (utc) on Aug. 26, 2002]
[edit reason] url changed to generic [/edit]
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, jetson77. I've seen meta-refresh and also a lot of JS redirection at Google. They must know about it, and I don't know how they handle it but I've seen some that are going to irrelevant sites disappear, while when they're on topic they seem to stick around.
It does attract attention and invite scrutiny by competitors, especially when the pages have high rankings.
Your example [only 2 visible links, and from ODP/Yahoo, instead of a remarkably major number of real existent links], match exactly with what happened to a lot of sites I have, this update.
And note, none of the for-Google-missing links, are now dead or PR0.
See the [for me very 'strange' and relevant] answer of GoogleGuy to a question posted by c1bernaughts:
[webmasterworld.com ]
I begin to convincing myself that this update, some big troubles happened.
I.ex., I have 2 sites, different types of contents, neither have spam, neither bad links, but the 2 sites are very similar about the 'sense' of their Google-optimisation.
Site 1 completely greyed, disappeared from index.
Site 2, still well-ranked.
I don't think is only a question af a new algo.
The sad thing, is that lot of people, here, relies on theirs good position in Google.
One mounth "dumped/greyed/etc" -> one mounth without bred.
[And, maybe, 1 mounth trying, like mads, to understand the obscure reasons of an appearing penalty]
cminblues
Interesting stuff cminblues. We will see how things settle....
Then you've heard wrong about Google. It has nothing directly to do with these being directories, but the PageRank of these directory pages. Just *one* link from a PR8 page should be good enough to get likely better than a PR5. It isn't how many link to you, it is *who* links to you with Google.
Yes of course I understand this. This isn't my point. If this was a normal situation, this would mean that a ridiculous amount of people would have a page rank of 5 or more. So basically if anyone wanted a page rank of 5 or more, they only needed to get onto yahoo or dmoz and they would be set.
This goes against what Google appears to be on about. There is no real relevent linking, either incoming or outgoing. Just simply two websites that are skewing the relevancy of popularity.
Perhaps it goes deeper in that links from these directories shouldn't even be used by Google because of this skewing?
Each level you go deeper you lose a pr point
I've been eyeing a cat 5 levels down (dmoz.org/one/two/three/four/five) that has a toolbar PR of 7. The cat immediately above it (dmoz.org/one/two/three/four) has a PR6.
Stuntdbl, you may be thinking about G's tendency to estimate the PR of brand new pages by taking the PR of it's parent directory & subtracting PR1.
Good luck,
rmjvol
