{"id":3816,"date":"2008-08-25T19:57:50","date_gmt":"2008-08-26T00:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/25\/why-has-my-website-lost-pagerank\/"},"modified":"2008-08-25T19:57:50","modified_gmt":"2008-08-26T00:57:50","slug":"why-has-my-website-lost-pagerank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/?p=3816","title":{"rendered":"Why Has My Website Lost Pagerank?"},"content":{"rendered":"
by Robin Porter<\/div>\n

In October lots of webmasters were fretting as Google apparently reduced their Pagerank. This influenced many millions<\/a> of websites. Discord resulted as many webmasters began to worry as to why this had happened and how they could vindicate their glorious Pagerank back to their website.<\/p>\n

Why did this happen?<\/p>\n

Lets look first at Pagerank and how it is predetermined. Pagerank is widely speculated to be calculated in accordance with the number and quality of incoming links to a website. It’s a complex formula that only Google knows, also noticing the importance of the page that the link originates from. Pagerank is measured on a scale of 1 to 10 but it is not a linear scale ie getting from 8 to 9 is a lot, lot harder than getting from 7 to 8. Also it is believed to include other factors such as the authority and trust of a website.<\/p>\n

Pagerank is wrongly believed by many webmasters to be the main critical factor that determines their search engine ranking positions ( SERPS). In reality there are a huge amount of factors that Google looks at to determine the SERPS, Pagerank is just one of them although it can be a deciding factor if all other things are equal.<\/p>\n

Over the last few years the effect has turned many webmasters into Pagerank junkies. They worry about their Pagerank and how to get links from other sites with higher Pagerank and they decline to link to sites with lower Pagerank etc etc. This has resulted in a whole industry of websites acquiring and selling links according to the Pagerank of the link page. As a result this has enraged sleeping dragon over at Google.<\/p>\n

Broadly it has been described that this readjustment of the Pagerank cause is as a result of Google penalising websites that are involved in the buying and selling of text links, with the aim of passing on Pagerank and hence improving their better SERPS.<\/p>\n

Also it is suspected that sites have lost Pagerank due to bad linking, broken linking and other general errors. The thought behind this is to do with Trust and Authority – Google thinks that a site with broken links and links to “bad neighbourhoods” is not one that should get a high trust score.<\/p>\n

Could this be the sole reason for the Pagerank readjustment?<\/p>\n

It is improbable hat this was the main underlying reason, as a huge amount of sites were affected that were not involved in trading links. More likely, this was a complete overhaul or readjustments of the scoring system, resulting in a wholesale reassessment of site scores. The theory about the trading of links as the cause, is a theory that Google are likely only too happy to let us believe. It is a fact that they do not like the buying and selling of links for the purposes of increasing SERPS, so they’re happy to let us think that they’ve applied penalties to this, in the hope that it will deter webmasters from doing this in future. In order to protect their secrets, the real reasons will probably never be known.<\/p>\n

So how can you increase your sites Pagerank?<\/p>\n

– Initially you should continue to engage in an ongoing link building campaign, getting links from websites of a similar nature to yours. Do not worry about pagerank.<\/p>\n

– Avoid certain practices that Google frown upon such as buying and selling of text links. Should you purchase text links for any other reason than to improve pagerank, check that the no follow tag is inserted in the link. Take into account though that it is much safer to avoid them totally.<\/p>\n

– Make sure your site has no broken links – including links to other sites, and does not link to sites that may be considered bad , such as spammy sites and those involved in selling text links.<\/p>\n

While there are many hypothesis and theories concerning Pagerank, the reality is it is not the “be all and end all”. Just focus on optimising your site and getting incoming links, getting good content and applying a good relevant theme to your website and let everyone else pull their hair out about Pagerank. It just ain’t that important.<\/p>\n

\n
About the Author:<\/div>\n
Robin Porter is CEO of Arpey Internet, a Maidstone web design company<\/a> based which provides affordable web design for the UK<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In October lots of webmasters were fretting as Google apparently reduced their Pagerank. This influenced many millions of websites. Discord resulted as many webmasters began to worry as to why this had happened and how they could vindicate their glorious Pagerank back to their website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-3816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1019"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}