Forum Moderators: open
There seems to be some disparity in the research I've done as to whether this is more likely to mean that a penalty has been applied, or whether its more likely to mean there isn't enough for Google to go on to apply a page rank.
All of the pages show no links to them in Google. In fact, they've simply been neglected. However, a lot of them are good, informative, worthy pages now that I'm looking at them again.
I'm wondering whether it would be worthwhile doing some internal links to a few of them to see if that can inject some new life.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
what was the previous PR of the pages, if any.
and when did this PR0 happen.
Shak
(as it happens I was looking at your site today, hope its not me who is jinxed)
I would say they had mostly 3-5 in PR. Not a single one of them has an internal link other than from a sitemap, and no external links.
If they been penalized, I could remove them and gather some of them up in a new site.
Not a single one of them has an internal link other than from a sitemap, and no external links.
Doesn't really sound like a penalty then. Probably a "naturally occurring" zero. Most likely if you just integrate them better into your site's link structure they'll pick up a respectable PageRank.
Usually, when a new page is uploaded to your site, you will see an arbitrary PageRank given to it. This prevails until the next update when, often, the grey bar shows until Google's algorythm is applied to the page and its true PageRank is then set.
I should add that this process can stretch out to two or three months.
What happended to the Pagerank of your sitemap? Still Ok? What was the sitemap's PR a few months ago?
I agree that so far it doesn't sound like a penalty.
I removed every case of an outbound link that goes to a PR0 site. Thus removing many links to my own PR0 sites.
Results are still pending.
About a month and a half ago, I restructured my sitemap. There were several hundred links on it spanning a couple of pages. The first page had a PR6 and I believe the 2nd had a PR5.
Heeding the Google admonishment to limit links to around 100 per page, I converted to a directory for the main sitemap page which still has a PR6. I then broke out the remainder into about 10 pages, linking to them from the main sitemap page and back again.
A number of the sitemap subpages have gone to PR0, but the page containing links to the pages I'm concerned about are on the current page three of the sitemap which has a PR4.
Its a little strange, because as you get down to page six of the sitemap, I have a PR0 from then on. Hope I've explained this clearly.
You can see it all in the site in my profile. Any observations about this would be most welcome.
It takes one or two updates for PageRank to settle. IMO you probably have some pages that don't have their PageRank yet.
If the pages have more potential that their new position in the hierrarchy justifies, then I would be inclined to link them from higher up before this update in order to give them a boost at the end of February.
On the first sitemap page add links to "sitemap page 2" "sitemap page 3", etc. with a little description of what's on those sitemap pages.
Did you change any URLs in the process of your changes? I get the feeling they simply haven't got their new PR after your changes. It looked like a gray bar to me (though in my case it was green because of my color scheme.)
BTW I really got interested in your site having just reached the big six-oh. I like the link structure you have there from a user's point of view.
I did notice it was your news links pages that had no PR. From a visitor's point of view I would prefer to see less news items and have them only those more related to seniors. They could span a week or two instead of almost daily. In other words if you could select the ones I'd most likely be interested in it would be more useful to me and perhaps look more theme related to Google.
Anne
As for the news pages, they're filled with headline feeds from Moreover.com. I have no control over them, actually, since they are feeds. Those pages are deliberately without PR, since I've applied a "no-follow" tag. Most of the news pages, IMO, do have a relation to senior concerns.
I don't think you'll have any difficulties from using truncated text for your menu links. One thing always to address as a priority is the visitor. Try to make the navigation straightforward, clear and simple.
Anne
I'll bet you a Boston beer that adding a one sentence description to each link will restore your PR.
Again, I'm going to do some interim patchwork, and then assess what further remedial work needs to be done after the next update or two.
Boston - You bet.
I do have text links on a number of white tool bar pages. But, you're right. Many of the links are old, pre-dating the current focus on anchor text.
I'm not talking about text in the links. I'm talking about plain old text. Your initial sitemap page has a PR6. You then have 21 category links.
When you look at each of those 21 pages, the ones that do not show the level of PR you would expect to see (PR5) are the ones that contain text only in hyperlinks. Those pages need to have an equal or greater amount of non-linked text on them.
