The Underscore Archives

There is a danger in using the Google PR toolbar as reasoning for making
changes to a site. It as an (unreliable) indicator only, and I would not
recommend making changes to a site based on it.

I have seen many sites with a low google pr have excellent listings and
compete well with sites who have a higher page rank, and have also seen
sites with higher google pr have poor listings for relevant phrases.

The PR is only a single indicator in my experience.
External links are one thing to think about in SEO, but they are not
everything by any means.
I haven't yet found a single method that can be globally applied to all
sites to ensure good listings, though proper optimisation of semantically
structured good content comes very close.

Good ranking and site listing is dependent on many things such as the
content (first and foremost), the optimisation of said content, number of
competitors currently ranking for relevant phrases, number of pages
containing duplicated or vastly similar content, page rank, quality of
external link text (v important), number of external links and more besides.

Therefore, how soon a page is picked up, how quickly it ranks for specific
phrases, how well it competes for and maintains long term its ranking etc,
relies on many factors.
Its not rocket science once you know what to look for, but it does change
from site to site, sometimes even when all other things are equal between
two sites and you would think both would rank the same.

I am not sure I understand the reasoning in using no-follow in the way
mentioned below to restrict things, but have learnt over the 12 years I have
been doing SEO not to discount anything out of hand (as long as it is white
hat) without trying it, as different things can sometimes help different
sites. 

Sam



-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Hamilton [mailto:matth at netsight.co.uk] 
Sent: 21 January 2008 13:26
To: underscore at under-score.org.uk
Subject: Re: [_] Thumb Twiddling


Also, remember that PageRank is distributed internally around the  
site by your internal navigation links.  In the majority of sites,  
the homepage naturally gets a very high page rank due to the  
traditional navigation of all pages linking back towards the home  
page. I've had a bit of an experiment on our site with using  
rel="nofollow" sprinkled around to try and alter the internal ranking  
a bit. e.g. the 'contact' page is in the top level navigation,  
meaning every page on the site links to it, yet from a page rank  
point of view that is a bit of a waste, so I've put some nofollows in  
to reduce it a bit.  Probably won't be able to tell for another  
couple of months what effect this has as my only real means of  
judging this is the toolbar rank which I believe is updated a few  
months delayed... probably to keep us all guessing a bit.   
Incidentally there are a few tools that can spider a site and attempt  
to simulate and calculate the relative internal page rank of pages,  
but I've never had the time to try and get any of them working.

-Matt

-- 
Matt Hamilton                                       matth at netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd.        Business Vision on the Internet
http://www.netsight.co.uk                             +44 (0)117 9090901
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting





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