Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm running a community website on www.example.com. My question to you is why our pagerank remains on such a low level? (Currently we have a PR of 3)
In order for you to get the big picture I'll tell you something about the history of our website.
We first ran the site on another domain (www.example.ch). We had a pagerank of 4 and only very few links pointing to our website.
We then switched the site to the domain www.example.ws. Again, we had a PR of 4.
Roughly one year ago, we finally moved to the domain www.example.com. Since then would could never get back up to a PR of 4 or even higher, despite the fact that we heavily worked on link building and on the internal structure on the site.
Our old domains are 301 redirected to our new domain. However, Google still maintains a lot of links to our old domain.
When we check what pages google has saved that link to us we can only find 32. On MSN however, there are 1,345 pages linking to us...
So why doesn't google incorporate all available information correctly and why is our PR still that low?
Thanks for any suggestions!
Reto
<Use example.com, not specifics.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>
[edited by: tedster at 7:32 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2006]
One factor to appreciate is that Google does not report all the links they know about ad use i theirraking calculation -- in fact, they never did! See this thread for a fuller discussion:
The Google link: Operator - it's not like other search engines! [webmasterworld.com]
A second factor is that Google often discounts (or even ignores) certain types of links - for example reciprocal links, or signature link in forums and blog comments. They do not just give credit for any link. Instead they most prefer "natural" links in the content area of a quality site on a related topic over links that a website generated through their own efforts.
This is a bit of a percentages thing as well as a measurement of how links appear over time. They watch your "link profile" for natural and unnatural patterns. So there's a good chace that many links you "worked on" getting are simple not doing you any good. Not all links count, and not all link "pass PR".
A third factor is that during your domain name changes, Google probably recalculated PR at least one time. PR is not an absolute measure or scale, but is calculated relative to all other urls on the web. Many sites find that PR can go down 1 notch even though they get more links.
There's more about PR in this thread:
Google PR - Page Rank FAQs [webmasterworld.com]
So 2004, my internet promotion site was able to give each of my clients PR4.
But now, some of my clients have with the same links only PR2.
The reason seems to be, that the themes of the sites are so different, that Google filtered away this links.
