An Interesting Observation

About Google Pagerank

[Krapulator]

I recently started in a new webmaster job. The company had been outsourcing all their web related work including SEO.
The SEO firm used pretty much all the dodgy techniques available. I have used this forum as a guide and have tripled search engine referals in five months using "legit" techniques. I am now in the process of removing the huge amount of doorway pages the SEO firm created and I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. The doorway pages for the main keywords had a pagerank of 0 for obvious reasons, yet some of the PR0 pages were still appearing in the top 10 results of the targeted keywords.
I have still removed them because they are too much of a liability, but its still a bit strange dont you think

[bonzibudy]

I'll bet that the keywords were "where can i find really really really obscure widgets that are cheap".

I dont think ive seen a PR0 site scoring for anything worth while. On a sidenote, are you not worried that PR0 has been assigned to some pages on their domain?

[Krapulator]

Yeah bloody oath I am. I'm deleting them as I find them. My average rank through the rest of the site is 5/6 so its not (too) critical

[bonzibudy]

hmm..I am still unsure about these PR0s. I posted a while ago asking, if you had no inbound links - do you get PR0 or do you only get PR0's as a PENALTY.

GoogleGuy kindly replied.

"PageRank comes from incoming links, so if we didn't see any sites linking, then you wouldn't have PageRank. ...... Note that "not having PageRank yet" is not the same as the mythical PR0 penalty that everyone seems to have a different definition for."

Note that he calls the PRO Penalty "mythical". Now, obviously the PR0 penalty is real (GG is more likley to know than me of course:)), but, if a penalty is applied, does it effect the DOMAIN or is it just the page?

[troels nybo nielsen]

> Note that he calls the PRO Penalty "mythical". Now, obviously the PR0 penalty is real

Note that "mythical" does _not_ mean "unreal".

[Krapulator]

In this case it doesn't seem to have affected any of the other pages PR within the domain, only the doorway pages that were all excessively crosslinked, had hidden links in small transparent gifs (as well as a link on each page to the SEO companies website). Most of the other pages are PR5 or 6.
Now that the doorways are gone, it will be interesting to see if the Pr on the rest of the site rises or stays as is.

[eCommando]

I have a domain where if you type in the domain name, the PageRank doesn't show up.

[domainname.com...]

but If you type in

[domainname.com...]

PageRank shows up. The name used to have about 6/7 PageRank, but now it's only around 4.
For certain key words, Google list it in the top 5.

[bonzibudy]

Krapulator,

yes it would, remember to let us know after the next UD

[bonzibudy]

troels,

sure, Mythical doesnt necessarily mean unreal, but it does mean that it is lacking 'factual basis' which i think is what GG was urging toward

[Krapulator]

Yep I'll let ya know