Getting My PageRank Back… Sort Of
May 5th, 2008 by Michael KwanAround this time last year, Beyond the Rhetoric had a PageRank of 4. Everything seemed to be rolling along just fine with my Alexa and Technorati ranks improving as well. The number of backlinks were steadily increasing as more people came to discover what this blog was all about. The jump to WordPress certainly made a world of difference.
And then the collateral damage started. Google started to crack down on anyone doing sponsored posts or selling paid text links (I’m guilty of both). As the year rolled along, I came to be on the receiving end of a Google PageRank smackdown. Beyond the Rhetoric was downgraded from a PR4 to a PR2. All was not lost, because I was still indexing and ranking for certain keywords (like Richmond Night Market). As Google continued on their rampage, however, things started to get worse.
I later discovered that some malicious code gave me a PR0. Having removed that code and sent Google a message indicating as such, I remained hopeful that the next PageRank update would bring good news. Now that the update is rolling its way through the web, it seems that some good news is a-coming.
It’s not quite the PR4 that I had before, but a PR2 is certainly better than a PageRank of zero. Yes, I know that PageRank isn’t quite as meaningful as it has been in the past and it’s more important to focus on things like growing the number of RSS subscribers, but it’s still an area that I pay some attention to.
The weird thing is that the above screenshot was taken from this PageRank checker. When I run the same check through iWebTool, Beyond the Rhetoric is still a PR0. Matt Freedman confirms that the Google Toolbar is reporting a PR2, so I guess it’s just taking some time to perpetuate through the servers.
So, I’m back on the PageRank saddle. With more RSS subscribers and higher traffic numbers than ever, it’s only a matter of time before I get back to PR4, right?
Filed under Technology.
It will come, Michael, don’t worry.
Keep in mind, too, that social media like Digg and StumbleUpon are quickly approaching Google in terms of being able to drive traffic. Get those things hopping and your PR will come back with a vengeance.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, as far as know, the amount of traffic driven to a site has never been the direct influencer or used as a yardstick to determine its PageRank.
Driving traffic spikes via Digg & SU to one’s blog or website is truly well and good, but I don’t see the link of that with attaining a high PR.
Lose the “BTR” and see what happens? All you would need to do is just do a 301 redirect from “BTR” to MichaelKwan.com actual and you should be good to go. Then you can set that URL properly in your .HTACCESS and your Google Webmaster Tools.
It probably doesn’t help that you write for Evil too! LOL!
I can’t see how the BTR is any different than getting Google to look at the WWW as a prefix, for example.
Can you tell me how often they update the pageranks?
There is no fix time frame or frequency for PageRank updates but it occurred about once every 2.5 months on average.
You can read this post for a brief history of PR update over the last 2 years or so.
It seems like it’s every few months, as far as I can tell.
Congrats on the return of the PR. Even though it isn’t quite as significant in many people’s eyes, it is still nice to see it improving.
At last check, I’m still at PR0, which was disappointing because at one point I had actually managed to scrape my way up to a PR1. I’m just going to focus on link building and networking and hope I eventually get to a PR4 (or higher) one day!
I fluctuate between not caring about PR and getting a little too excited when my sites are rewarded. This last round was pretty kind, it seemed. Several of my PR 0 sites moved up to 3s and 4s.