Forum Moderators: open
What would cause Google to list a PR6 site on the 4th results page, BELOW a PR3 and PR5 listing? If there were any penalties, would the page still be shown as a PR6?
Bill
Dinkar is likely making this distinction:
Rage Rank is proportional top the number of incoming links to your page x "quality" of those links,
determined by Google, i.e. off-page stuff. The link text used on incoming links appears to be
important.
Optimization is mostly on-page stuff, Title, Description, Meta Keywords, keyword presence in body
text, keyword density, link text, alt text, etc. (Meta keywords and keyword density don't affect
Google much)
Your site drop could be due to a hiccup in the Google database, or perhaps your competitors have
noticed you and have improved their pages' optimization.
It appears that there is a "weighting" of search-term matches vs. Page Rank that occurs during
searches. Only Google knows what that weighting is, and it is likely to change. Given
equally-good search-term matches, the page with the higher PR gets displayed first.
Cheers!
Jim
We don't normally do site reviews here, but since your site dropped precipitously, it's an unusual
case. So, if it's the site in your profile, I'll offer a few comments:
The word "lookup" and its variants are repeated too many times in your meta keyword tag. This may
or may not affect Google, which is rumored to ignore that tag completely. However, too many repeats
can get you demoted or banned on AltaVista, for one example. Try replacing some these repeats with
synonyms like "family name history, ancestor research" maybe? Through experimentation and getting
banned/unbanned several years ago, I settled on no more that three repeats of any word or part of a
phrase. I shoot for no more that two (singular, plural). Eight is too much.
The second comment I'd make is that there is little text on the page for a SE spider to eat. How
does this compare to your competition? You could flesh it out with a few paragraphs about what a
"lookup" is - I for one have no experience in the area your site covers, but I might like to know
about great-great grand-aunt Mary... Maybe the "info" pages contain content you could abstract into
a couple/three paragraphs and include on the front page. The on-page text should contain the words
in your meta keyword tag, and looking toward usefulness, the on-page text should explain the
concepts you highlight in your keywords tag...
I'm a newbie visiting your site... Tell me right up front what it's about, please. I may indeed
decide that I'm not interested. But if I AM interested, I'm looking for "helpful" sites that make
it easy to find what I need quickly, even if I don't speak the lingo. If you help me, I'll stay.
Without researching your incoming links, I can't tell if there are any problems related to that.
Since your PR is good, I assume not. But more expanatory content on the entry page might both help
with the SERP ranking problem and make your site more sticky.
I dunno...
HTH,
Jim
However, what I was wondering, and I may understand more fully now is this: How can a PR6 site fall below a PR3 site in position? I am still a PR6 but have been repositioned to the 4th serp. There are many listings that are BELOW PR6 that are above me.
I have been told today that while Google is dancing, things will be out of kilter in the positions but that when the reindexing is complete, the positions will be more accurate.
I hope to goodness this is true!
Again, thank you for your valuable suggestions.
Bill
However, what I was wondering, and I may understand more fully now is this: How can a PR6 site fall below a PR3 site in position? I am still a PR6 but have been repositioned to the 4th serp.
On thing that might not be clear is that PageRank is based on each page... so your "site" can not be "a PR6," while a page on that site might have a PR6. The point is, in the SERP you are looking at, is the PageRank of that particular page on your site 6?
There are many listings that are BELOW PR6 that are above me.
Again just to clarify: there is nothing at all out of the ordinary about that. PageRank is just one of many factors involved in ranking at Google. What does seem to be out of the ordinary is your precipitous drop in the rankings you're monitoring.
Yeah, and things are getting even weirder, with Google recently doing multiple deep crawls on sites
PR5 and up. Also, the fact that they have multiple servers (100's or 1000's) in different locations
and you never know which one of those you'll actually connect to, and how "fresh" its database is
(right now).
I know you didn't ask for a site review, but having looked at your site (I love a good mystery) and
seeing what I saw, I figured I'd might as well say so. Glad to hear you've recovered somewhat...
Compare the Title, Description, and body text for your exact search terms between that PR3 site and
your site. It's likely they've got some small advantage, and you may be able to figure it out.
Again, it appears that page rank is used as the final arbiter when all else is equal. And that may
or may not be true tomorrow... Google seems to rank by "best match to search phrase" first, then
by page rank.
Jim
On thing that might not be clear is that PageRank is based on each page... so your "site" can not be "a PR6," while a page on that site might have a PR6. The point is, in the SERP you are looking at, is the PageRank of that particular page on your site 6?
Hi JayC,
Sorry for my poor wording...I really did mean "page"! I am only concerned about my index page. My state pages seem to do ok with focused keywords. Since "genealogy lookups" seems to be the most popular search terms according to my stats, I want those search terms to bring up my page at a decent rank. Last week I was at the #1 listing. I can understand a slight fluctuation of rank within the first page...but moved all the way to the 4th? Eeeks....!
I know you didn't ask for a site review, but having looked at your site (I love a good mystery) and seeing what I saw, I figured I'd might as well say so. Glad to hear you've recovered somewhat...
Compare the Title, Description, and body text for your exact search terms between that PR3 site and your site. It's likely they've got some small advantage, and you may be able to figure it out.
And I appreciate the help! But actually I'll not be "recovered" till I see my link at least on the first page where it was before. I will be working on it using your suggestions over the next several days.
Thanks,
Bill
If your phrase are very competitive at all, you willl often find that on-page factors are all over the map for the top results.
There was some good discussion about these items in
[webmasterworld.com...]
PageRank is not directly used to rank pages! PageRank is not directly used to rank pages! PageRank is not directly used to rank pages! (What I tell you three times is true.)
See this thread [webmasterworld.com]
zeus
what is it good for?
PageRank is important because it's one of the factors contributing to LinkRank. For a search query s and a link l with anchor text a, LinkRank(s,l) depends on the absolute PageRank of the page from which l originates, source(l), divided by the number of links on that page, multiplied by a measure of agreement between the link anchor text and the search query, call it AnchorMatch(s, anchor(l)). SearchScore(s,p) is the sum of L(s,l) for all incoming links l, multiplied by a weighting for on-page factors, call it OnPage(s,p).
SearchScore(s,p) =
OnPage(s,p) .
sum {over links l such that target(l) = p} LinkRank(s,l)
where
LinkRank(s,l) = PageRank(source(l)) . AnchorMatch(s,anchor(l))
Well, something like that, anyway - the actual algorithm is certainly a lot more like that than the "rank pages containing search string by PageRank, weighted if the string is in the TITLE", which is how Google worked in 1998 and is still how a lot of people seem to think it works.
I'd love to know more about Google's algorithm, more out of curiosity than any desire to influence SERPs. (My honours thesis was on distributed minimum-spanning-tree algorithms.) I'm surprised there hasn't been serious work put into reverse-engineering the algorithm - PageRank is well-documented, but at least some of the elements of the AnchorMatch and OnPage functions should be quantifiable with a bit of experimentation.
As I understand it, PR tells you that a page is important because a lot of people link to it.
What it doesn't tell you is what topic the page is important in relation to. That's a question of relevance, and your position in the search engine results is some combination of PR and relevance for a particular search (plus, I would imagine, some other factors such as broken links etc).
*All other things being equal*, a page with higher PR will come out higher on the SE results.
It is odd that your position has dropped so far. If you were #1 on a given term last week, then you must have been considered relevant at that time. Have you checked to make sure you don't have a bunch of broken links to other sites -- that sort of thing could drag you down. Or perhaps your server was down during part of a crawl?
If I were you I'd take a deep breath, relax as much as possible, and wait to become number 1 again when the next crawl comes around.
