Fantasy article ranked PR0 for no apparent reason

Is Google a literary critic now?

[menyak]

This is frightening: One of our editors wrote a fantasy football article <snip> and - BAM! - Google gave it a PR0!

I admit that it's not the best article we have ever written, but it ain't THAT bad! (Or is it?) My best guess would be that it accidentially contains some keywords that make Google think it's about porn or the devil himself, but actually I couldn't find any.

Any thoughts?

[mack]

what quality of inbound links does it have? are they on topic, does the article fit in with the overall theme of the rest of your site. These can all be factors. One thing to remember is that when you upload the page at first it will receive an estimated PR taken from the root of your domain. It is when your sites gets crawled and Google updates that true PR will be reflected. If there is no real PR then it will apear as if the page has gone from PR=x to PR=0

[edited by: mack at 11:58 am (utc) on Nov. 17, 2002]

[Marcia]

>the devil himself

menyak, if the devil himself or reasonable facsimiles were automatically penalized or banned by Google a lot of us around here wouldn't stand a chance.

Google has over 3 billion pages indexed, it's unlikely that very many are read or hand reviewed. It sounds more likely that either there aren't links to give more PR or it's just not computed for the page yet. See what happens after the coming update.

[mack]

As a site note to what Marcia has said.....
I have noticed that the fresh bot gave one of my pages a dressing down from PR5 to PR0 so I assume this means that Google recognises it is there but has not computed the Page Rank yet. Usualy Page Rank will only be asigned once a month at the main update.

[troels nybo nielsen]

Off topic:

Just googled the devil. Ca. 5,430,000 pages.

[menyak]

Thanks everybody for the quick feedback!

Marcia, I did think the URL was relevant, but if it's not allowed, np, I'll explain what's there on the page (you'll just have to believe me ;).

- This is a PR6 domain. There's a main menu link to our "current article," which is a PR5. The article page contains a sub-menu to all our previous articles. All of these articles are only linked to my this sub menu, and all are PR4. EXCEPT for the one I have described. It's a PR0, and YES, it's a true PR0, white bar and everything.
- No, the article doesn't contain any outbound links to any sites, good or bad.
- It's a fantasy football site, and a fantasy football article.
- The Googlebot does do some keyword checking so the content can lead to a penalty. But again, I have no clue what might be the reason here. It's really just plain ff talk with a lot of rambling about points and players.

Mack, I have heard this for the first time and it would surprise me. Can anybody confirm this?

[troels nybo nielsen]

I'm surprised too. During the last two weeks I have made several new pages for a PR5 site and they all have (estimated) PR's from 2 to 4 quite like one would expect.

[cwebb]

Well, Hi menyak! It's a new article so it should have a guesstimate of it's PR but the page naem stayed the same, still there are some "bad" words in it: stud, "feel free to join"

And hey, I got a PR5?!

Great site, by the way :)

[menyak]

Thanks for the kudos, cwebb! :) In fact, the page I'm referring to isn't our newest article but an older one which has already been spidered by Google ("Who would you pick?").

[cwebb]

Very interesting...

[Macguru]

Is it, say a four to six week old page? I have many of them like that. New domains, pages where gray last month, still show no backlinks. Some deeper pages show PR 0. Hope it will be fixed next month.

[mat_bastian]

no need to worry, as noted by others, sometimes it just takes a little time... I think there is a difference between a penalty of PR0 and a new site that is just being indexed. i just came off of a two month period with a PRO on a new site and this last update was granted a PR4(not great but not nearly as scary as the "0") across most of the site. Give it time, it will resolve.

[edited by: mat_bastian at 2:09 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2002]

[troels nybo nielsen]

Macguru

You mean that Google had some kind of trouble indexing new pages in the first half of october?

[menyak]

Hm... The fact that it's already in the index and can be found would suggest that it's not THAT new. Also, I wouldn't care so much about a single page being PR0ed (although it's not nice), but I'm afraid that it might rub off on other pages as well, unless I do something about it (don't know what, though, as I don't know the reason). Finally, there's always some "academic" interest involved in such a question. Finding the answer to a question that seems weird may always help understanding Google better as a whole. :)

Macguru, this is something else than a new domain. Google only found this page because it followed a link within my site, so backlinks should be out of question. Also, it's not deep, but level 2 (as stated above).

[Macguru]

trouble indexing new pages in the first half of october

Could be a trouble, could be a new "behavior". Most new sites we popped online since 8 weeks are like this. I have not enough sites frequently adding new content to verify anything different for new pages to older domains.

[GoogleGuy]

menyak, we have no official opinions on fantasy articles. I promise we didn't penalize your page. Look around to read more about different ways that people interpret the pagerank bar, e.g. if it's a new page, Google probably hasn't computed any PageRank value for it yet would be my guess.

[menyak]

Ok, thanks, looks like I have some reading ahead. Guess I'll just calm down, have a beer and wait for the next update (like everyone else in the webmaster world ;) ).