Managed to get into google's results

but with a PR0. Oh dear.

[ppg]

Hi,

Please bear with me on this, I'm very new to SEO and I may be making some daft assumptions through lack of knowledge.

The site I'm currently employed to work on was not listed in google at all when I started. I think this was because of a flash intro page and a java applet navigation system and no inbound links to speak of.

The homepage (redirected to after the flash intro) had no text on it at all originally, just images and a 'mission statement' which was also a jpeg. In an attempt to get into the listings I removed the mission statement image and replaced it with text, thinking that having at least some text content might help.

It seems to have had some effect, since the last update the site is now indexed in google (well the first 2 pages - I assume that this is because the spider won't follow the applet nav links).

Unfortunately, its PR0.

I have a full redesign of the site due to go live in the next few days, into which I've built some of the stuff I've learned so far by hanging around here (thank you everybody).

Now I'm worried that I've shot myself in the foot by managing to get us listed with a temporary measure which has resulted in a penalty. I've seen a lot of posts here about how hard it can be to recover from PR0. Basically I'm worried that all the work I've put into the redesign has now been wasted from an SEO point of view and I've actually made things worse. DOH!

There's no serious spamming going on that I'm aware of, no crosslinking between sites or anything like that, I seem to have fallen foul of something I don't understand.

Is PR0 always a penalty or could the PR0 be because google sees the site as only having a couple of pages with very little content?
Sorry for the long post.

[dazz]

If your PR bar is grey (page is not ranked by google) i wouldnt worry too much as it could be because google have just found your site and havent given it a PR rating yet....if it white with a PR0 id worry and think of getting a new domain name and start again.

[ppg]

thanks Dazz,

definitely a PR0 - white bar and the rollover shows it as PR0.

Unfortunately getting a new domain name isn't an option since its the company name in this case.

Perhaps an email to google will help?

[dazz]

hmm youd be lucky if you heard anything back...stickymail me the domain and ill see if i can spot anything thats causing it

[ppg]

Thanks _very_ much for taking the time to help dazz,

the URL is in my profile, I've stickied you it too.

[stever]

Hi ppg

Try getting some decent links before you panic.

The only external link you have is from a site which is also PR0 (which in their case is almost certainly a penalty). So you have no PR coming in to a page which has, effectively, no content - how would you like Google to allocate you any PageRank or to judge the content or theme of your site?

[nutsandbolts]

ppg: Put simply, there are 0 rank penalties from being very naughty by linking to bad sites/neighbourhoods and then there are 0 pagerank's because sites have a low amount of content or very few links to-from them etc. You can also get a 0 rank if your site has only been lightly indexed by Google because it's only "gone live" towards the end of the Google index period.

I think your site is in the latter - and as soon as you add more HTML based content and increase link exchanges with sites of equal subjects/high(ish) rank value you should be fine. Have you, for instance, tried to get your site in Dmoz yet? Do so! It's worth it...

[dazz]

Yes i agree...add good content on main page with relivance to the keywords you want to rank well with..IMO lose the flash intro! SE's dont like them and neither do most ppl searching. Ask for links from other websites in your field and also apply for links at every directory you can find! good luck!
also remove the link to the PR0 site

[ppg]

Thanks a lot for your help everyone!

So, it looks like I can breathe again and the site hasn't been penalised after all. Phew!

I'm no fan of flash intro pages either. This is the site I inherited when I started working for the company and my redesign will be going up soon - I have removed the flash intro and added a small amount of (hopefully) better text content on the front page.

Stever: I'm curious, how did you find the PR0 site that links to me? I tried 'link:www.mysite.com' at google and came up with nothing.....is there a better method?

nutsandbolts: yes, I have entered the site for a DMOZ category a couple of months ago but it hasn't appeared as yet - maybe they thought it was too rubbish to warrant an entry :)
Theres a large amount of HTML content and pdf's in pages reached from the main page. For the update I've replaced the applet navigation with a flash one, and included an html link to the site map just to make sure they get spidered. hopefully this will help.

dazz: what was the link to the PR0 site you mention? Theres a link there to another site which is an evaluation version of some security software, running on another server owned by the same company and referenced by an IP rather than a domain name, which has PR0 - I can't take it down though since the company needs it.

Once again, thanks for all the help, its very much appreciated!

[JayC]

I'm curious, how did you find the PR0 site that links to me? I tried 'link:www.mysite.com' at google and came up with nothing.....

Links from sites with low PageRank won't show up when you use the "link" command -- but you could find that link by searching instead for your domain name, in quotes.

[lazyz]

Just a few things I learned to get good page rank...
(1) Get listed in DMOZ and/or Yahoo
(2) Google loves content - add a little every day
(3) link your pages back to your main site/main page (make your site googlebot friendly - so your entire site gets crawled)
(4) Get some quality inbound links...

Went from PR3 to PR5 the last update...

[luma]

I wouldn't worry if you get PR0 on a new site with no links to it and no content. Add real content; get some links; wait for the next update (actually Googlebot was around during the last couple days so it might be too late for the next update) and you'll do fine.

Java navigation applets suck. JavaScript navigation sucks. Flash navigation sucks. Redirect navigation sucks. Use *real* links for naviagtion (add CSS to make them look nice).

As soon as your new design is up, submit to DMOZ (right category) again. Good luck!

[ppg]

Although I have a flash menu for the new update the site map has straight HTML links to every page so hopefully I should be ok there in the short term - I believe google can follow flash links now?

For the next update after this one I'm going to re-do the navigation all with HTML links.

Also I'll be putting a lot of time into a reciprocal link exchange campaign once the update is live.

Since I'm still on the steepest part of the SEO learning curve at the moment I see mistakes in my first redesign every time I learn something new, and keep wanting to go back and change things. I have to draw the line somewhere though or I'll never get this update live!

Thanks to everyone who helped me on this, especially big thanks to Brett for running such such a great resource.