3rd Level Interior Pages at PageRank Zero and Bad Ranking

[Lothar]

Anyone have any ideas on why a 4 year old site with a decent amount of back-links (nothing shady) would have the homepage at a pagerank 5, 2nd level category pages at page rank 4 and most "third-level" pages are pagerank zero and have very little ranking (bottom of SERPS of 1000 for keywords that they should rank in the top 100 at least)

It seems the homepage and category level pages really do rank as they should in SERPS, within reason, but the long-tail pages are mostly useless. By the way, the 3rd level pages I'm talking about are over 3-4 years old in certain cases while some are newer... They are basically our content pages that change weekly, new ones added, etc.

Anyone know if this is a duplicate content penalty with the PR0 on all those pages or something else that I'm not figuring out. The 3rd level pages do use some repetition but we've done our best to vary it as good as possible.

Thanks for any input.

[tedster]

When it come to duplicate content, we should rarely think in terms of "penalty" -- just filters. It would not explain a PR drop, at any rate. PR is not related to content, just links.

How's the PR circulation on your domain? That is, how many of those PR4 pages are there to send link-love to how many level-3 pages? Also, are there any direct inbound links from other domains to level-3?

[willybfriendly]

I would also ask, how many deep links to you have on this site? I have found that having links to those 3rd and 4th tier pages seems to make the entire site more robust.

WBF

[jimbeetle]

Anyone know if this is a duplicate content penalty...

If you're asking this you must have a reason to suspect it. 'Fess up ;-)

But, as Ted said, dupe content is mostly filtered out during SERPs delivery, not as a penalty. Do the 3rd-level pages have unique title and meta description elements? That goes a long way in getting past the filter.

One thing I've found that helps quite a bit in a pyramid site structure is interlinking related lower level pages from different funnels. You don't have to go crazy and force anything, but if pages are related in some way, do link them.

[Lothar]

In regards to Tedster's post/answer:

The pagerank of the homepage is 5, 2nd level pages are 4 and SOME of the long-tail pages are at a 3 but most are pagerank zero.

That's what puzzles me... Why are the "long-tail" pages or our most valuable keyword pages pageranked zero but some are not (a small few, about 15% have pagerank 3, the rest have 0). The funny thing is the pagerank 3 pages really don't rank for anything either though so it's not much help. Like I said, the homepage and 2nd level pages rank EXACTLY (some top 10 results on decent keywords) as you would expect it to with decent links from valid directories, one-way links from avid fans, blogs, etc plus even some press links.

In regards to WillyBFriendly's post:

We have a couple of deeplinks to the 3rd level pages that are zapped but most people will link to our homepage from blogs, etc.

In regards to JimBeetle's post:
We've done some things to make the 3rd level pages unique but in essence they are using a template based structure (left nav-bar, content area, right nav-bar). We try to vary the title tags, meta keywords and meta description but certain keywords do get repeated a lot as they are the core essence of what people type in.

The content area can vary based on our content management system although if no content is available it will just say "No WIDGETS found for #*$!#*$!xx". That page could repeat in many cases to be honest although some pages change daily with content.

Hope any of that info helps.

Thanks for your input.

[willybfriendly]

One thing that I did on a couple of our sites was to link directly from the home page to deep pages. Seperate menu box titled "Articles of Interest" or some such thing. Some of these pages are more seasonal in nature, so I can rotate them a bit.

It turned out on one site that a niche section began delivering nearly 50% of the total site traffic. It is a section of a dozen or so pages dealing with a subject that is only vaguely related to the theme of the site. The pages currently rank #1 for a 2 word term returning over 2 million results, #1 for another 2 word term returning 1.5 million results, and excellent rankings for a whole lot of longer terms.

But my real point is to investigate the direct link from home to depth. It might well work for you too.

WBF

[ashear]

The most common reason that I see this is due to dynamic attributes in the URL’s, or something blocking the URL’s from getting proper credit. Could be javascript, or something not simple.