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I'm a newbie here. This forum rocks.
My domain index page have a google PR5
the index page has nothing but just a tag to redirect to my invision board, which google gives only PR1.
Recently, I have moved my forum to a subdomain, instead of the sub directory it used to be in.
Now the forum gets 0 PR from google!
I use .htaccess to redirect old forum pages URLs to the new corresponding ones.
I also use SE-friendly URLs in the forum.
My question is: how can I make my forum get the high PR of 5 that my idex page only has?
And why is google giving my index redirecting page 5 while the forum index page gets only 1, and now even 0 after the move (a month ago)?
I appreciate any ideas to improve my PR in google.
Thanks so much in advance.
If you only moved the forum a month ago, then I wouldn't expect the PageRank to have caught up yet.
Sometimes, a META refresh will pass the PageRank on to the destination page; it used to depend on the delay but I don't know how things are now. A 301 status HTTP redirect will usually pass the PR, if high enough, but a straight link from your home page to your forum page would be as effective.
and what is "301 status HTTP redirect"? I heard that before but, believe or not, I never knew what is it. Is it a file I make or a tag to add? and how please?
> what is "301 status HTTP redirect"?
It's where your Web server sends a redirect instead of a Web page. You should consult your provider, or if you run your own server (or have access to technology capable of writing HTTP headers) you will probably find posts on the subject in the Apache [webmasterworld.com], Perl/CGI [webmasterworld.com], Microsoft [webmasterworld.com], PHP [webmasterworld.com] or technology [webmasterworld.com] forum (depending on what kind of hosting platform and features you have available).
And, what if I add a link to my sitemap, in addition to the link to the forum that you advised me to add, would the links in the sitemap also inherit the same pagerank as the home page too then?
and does any other links within my domain that I add there inherit the same pagerank too?
(I have different sitemap pages, in linked chains, one with pages of 30 links each, 100, 300, 500, and 1000 links.)
You should also be doing your individual forum pages with a permanent redirect instead of just a redirect. It will tell googlebot that you have permanently moved the pages, instead of just temporarily.
Do not use a permanent redirect if you ever intend to put some real content on your home page. Go with your meta redirect and put the link on there for the spiders.
It makes good sense to add your sitemap too, and maybe some featured posts if you are willing to commit to maintaining the page. The extra links will reduce the PageRank you pass on; it's actually split among them but due to the Toolbar log scale this makes much less difference than you'd expect.
"You should also be doing your individual forum pages with a permanent redirect instead of just a redirect."
I didn't understand that part. If you mean I should do a permenant redirect from the old forum URls to the new ones, yes I did. Now any entry o my forum in google with the old URL redirects to the name URLs (I had about 35000 entries in google, reduced recently to 19000 since the move a month ago, athe new URLs has now about 6000 entries)
Ok ciml, I'm convinced now and I'll remove the refresh tag. Thanks.
I've got a few sitemap pages, each having 500 links. They are dynamically-generated, and the produced pages are very slim: about 80k only. I've read here G.G saying that a simap page is ok so long that it does not exceed 100k max.
If so, then I'll benefit much if I add 10 of those in my home page. Do you think its a good idea? all 10 pages are linked together, but I think the links they carry would get better PR rating if they are all linked directly from the home page, am I right in this thinking? or it doesnt matter?
Also: what is "Toolbar log scale"? and could you elaborate a little further on how more links would
split the passed PR in a small difference? how small?
Well, you're right about the 100k max, but 500 links per page may be problematic. For a long time, any page with more than some number (probably 100) would pass on much less PR than the normal 'divide by the links' rule. Last time I checked this had been relaxed, and even a page with 250 links or more would adhere to the standard rules of PageRank. That was a few months ago and things are likely to change again, so I'd stick to less than 100 links per page as Google suggest in their webmaster guidelines.
> all 10 pages are linked together, but I think the links they carry would get better PR rating if they are all linked directly from the home page
This is right, and that PR would be PR that otherwise would have gone to the forum home page. It's just a case of sharing the PR among the links (minus a tiny proportion that is donated to the index at large).
The Toolbar uses a logarithmic scale, you'd need to refer back to your school days but basically PR6 is n times more than PR5 is n times more than PR4, etc. Search for Vilfredo Pareto to see why it's a very sensible way to scale something like PageRank.
Many people pick n as between 4 and 7. I say higher from observing PR flow within sites, perhaps slightly above 20.
The reason it's important is this; if you have one link then it gets some proportion of the PR, say 90%. If you now add nine extra links, the 90% is shared so that first link gets 9%. This sounds like a very large reduction, but if if the difference between these two cases is only three quarters of one notch of Toolbar PageRank, then it doesn't seem like such a big deal.
Also, note PR flow within the site; at some point the PR is likely to flow down through your SE friendly forum to the lower levels, the additional sitemap only helps spread it a little more evenly.
wow, you've got very useful tools there.
(btw: I'm looking for a tool to acurately show page download times, do you know where I can find a free tool? I use netmechanic, but they always give me very bad results)
