What to do when Google PR0s Your Business | Hacker News Reader

What to do when Google PR0s Your Business

coderrr.wordpress.com

38 pointsrasengan27 comments

I see a PR6 for your website, and a Google search for "private internet access" brings you up as the top result.

The PR score reported by browser plugins can often be incorrect, as Google usually only bothers to update their forward-facing PR scores every month or so. Of course, their internal PR is updated constantly.

I've also had my site return a N/A PR score a number of times, and it had no effect on my actual rankings. It's probably just an issue with your particular browser plugin, and it should begin reporting correctly within a day or two.

Being the second person to say this, we really hope you are both right. Before this, we couldn't find anyone, anywhere who could find it reporting anything other than N/A through sites and plugins. We also waited 24 hours before bringing this to light to see if the issue would fix itself.

Just to echo the other people on this thread who say that they see PageRank, I checked and it looks like you have plenty of PageRank internally as well. I didn't see any manual webspam actions that we'd taken on the site either. Have you actually checked in the Google Toolbar? That's the only official place to see our toolbar PageRank--lots of other sites and plugins can be broken in various ways.

In general, PageRank tends to drop for one of two reasons. The first is url canonicalization issues (e.g. messing up http vs. https, www vs. non-www, rel=canonical pointing to weird places like 404 pages). The second reason is selling links that pass PageRank, which violates our guidelines.

Is there any way to access the official PageRank reading on a Mac? As far as I know Google Toolbar is not available for that platform.

I'd love to know this too - anybody?

I found something from ChromeFans.org which seems to be working quite alright, although it's not the official Google extension.

Edit: In the Chrome Store

Thank you for taking the time to examine this issue for us, sir.

We took your advice and booted up an old Windows machine to try out the Google Toolbar, and sure enough, as you had advised, the PR was displayed as 6/10. We will assume this is the last word on the issue.

Thanks again, sir.

Happy to help. I think the folks in the Google webmaster forum at http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters could have answered the questions about this too.

Sounds good - definitely a valuable resource, sir!

Cheers, and have a great Memorial Day Weekend!

Hey Matt, thanks a lot for investigating, I've updated the post.

It always freaks me out how much power Google really has over all sites, not just the spammers. The panda update, for example, killed TeachStreet, which recently ended up selling to Amazon as an aquihire.

What's the conventional wisdom on why Panda hit TeachStreet?

For the uninitiated, "PR0s" == "set Page Rank to zero".

Glad to see their problem's been resolved.

Hmmm according to my Chromes SEO Site Tools plugin you're at a PR6

It'd be great news if this is just a bug in a single Google DC/Node, but we're located in different parts of the world; and we're getting PR0 on all of our SEO extensions. The prcheck websites are also showing N/A.

Where are you seeing this number, just curious? I just got the plugin but I can't find it.

Why do you care about your toolbar PR? If your site still has traffic from Google, and still indexed, PR is just a number.

A lot of agencies use PR and Alexa rankings to negotiate rates.

negotiate rates for what?.. link buying for Pagerank?

Advertisements.

I'm not entirely sure why you're being so hostile since you're clearly not familiar with the content being discussed.

PR can affect your ranking on searches overtime as mentioned in the article.

Focus on your users, not on search engines. Whether you have a high PR or not has no effect on your users.

If users can't find you, you won't be getting any more of them. Engineering is fantastic, but not much use without people knowing about your hard work.

Read the original piece of investigative journalism that started it all here:

http://llsocial.com/2012/05/search-secrets-prominent-seo-com...

Talking like a SEO Guy, Pagerank is not a metric for ranking on Google SERP's, in the past was. But pagerank is good to know the reputation of a site and advertisements.

The important is ranking for effective keywords and receive traffic from that. Search for videos of Matt Cutts explaining pagerank.

My advice for you, keep the good work in your site and wait for the next Pagerank's update.

Hopefully this is just a temporary hiccup, but you should use this opportunity for scenario planning on what would happen if Google really did cut you off from search traffic. Even if the return on investment/effort of other traffic sources appears worse than Google, diversification has its own merits.

This is really good advice. We'll definitely use this opportunity as a warning to perform preemptive planning should this scenario arise again. Thanks for pointing this out.

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