How important is Google Pagerank?
Is Google’s Pagerank still important? Does it really mean anything if you have a high pagerank? well, maybe…
Many of the current regulars believe PageRank (PR) is no longer important to Google SERPs. Google started it’s search engine based on PageRank, but over the years they have had to alter their search algorithm to combat those who try to gain higher rankings through understanding how the algorithm works and adapting a websites code etc… to meet those requirements.
For example a couple of years back you could create a new site with 1,000 optimized pages (and optimizing a page isn’t rocket science), give it enough links (from any source almost) to get the home page to PR5 and within a few months you were practically guaranteed a fair chunk of targeted traffic. Now it takes at least 9 months and more likely 12 months to see any significant traffic. It’s been called the Sandbox Effect and has really made organic SEO much harder.
Some Websites have a very low pagerank, but still get allot of traffic. In those cases, pagerank is of no real importance.
This change does not mean Google no longer uses PR/links as part of it’s ranking process, just it’s changed how it’s does things to make an SEOs task much harder.
My take on this is Google used to take the value of a link and basically immediately pass that link benefit in full to the recipient page. Now (2005 onwards) there’s a significant delay between adding a link and seeing it’s benefit fully. So when a page gains a new link it won’t see it’s full effect for maybe 6 months or more (I estimate it’s between 9 and 12 months).
Since a lot of people have little patience and expect what they do today to show rewards quickly this has led them to believe PR is no longer important, since the PR of the page goes up within 3-4 months, but rankings doesn’t move for 6+ months (12+ months in some cases).
As a webmaster this means you must obtain long term links no short term links like you see with the blackhat technique of link spamming where a comment spammed link from a blog has a relatively short life on a high PR page.
To the webmaster building a real, substantial business around Google traffic expect a minimum year delay, it will be slow going with a lot of work, but you’ll get there eventually and when you do you will most likely stay there for years to come.
This is what businesses should want (long term stability) and what Google wants (sites that have earned their traffic), no fly by night web sites that rank well for a couple of months, get banned and so are deleted only to be replaced with a similar site that’s banned a few months later.
PR is also important for other reasons, which I’ll explain another time.
So Google pagerank does matter, it just depends on what you are looking for when it comes to pagerank.
List of Ping services
If you are a blogger or have a website that gets updated regularly, you should do a “ping”. Basically a little message to a server that tells it you have updated your blog/website. Beneath follows a list of servers you should ping. In most cases you can have this done automatically. Using wordpress its really easy, just add them to your Options > Writing > Update Services within wordpress.
Why is this important? Like i mentioned before, it tells these servers that you have updated your blog/webiste and that then, in theory, will get you more visitors and better rankings within search engines.
General Ping Services:
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
I hope that this little bit of information helps.
To tweet or not to twitter.
I found this great post at problogger: 9 Benifits of Twitter for bloggers
I have now started to use twitter aswell. I’m actually enjoying it. Its strange because I was never really into things like this. But twitter is Different. for me its a mixture of Chat and a forum. And a bit of Social Bookmarking thrown in.
With me starting to use twitter. I also found TinyUrl. It takes all these long URL’s and turns them into short, small ones and takes you to that Long URL.
So this URL:http://www.gitui.com/sharing/important-things-to-know-when-changing-a-wordpress-theme/
will then be turned into this: tinyurl.com/5gxv28
Now does that not look better? it also saves space in the “tweets” and if you want to generally save space on a webiste, blog, forum or anywhere else you might need to.
Robert.
Important things to know when changing a wordpress theme
One of the best features of Wordpress is the availability of 1000s of free themes for customization of your blog. New theme are created every day and available for free download. When a theme is more attractive than the one you are using for your theme, you definitely have the tendency to change it. I too have changed my theme quite a few time before making my own theme. There are few important things to do when you change your theme.
- After installing the new theme on your blog make sure that the links are working fine. Links like About me and Contact are crucial for a blog as they are the main source to contact the author or get more information about the blog. Most of the new themes will have default About page. Make sure that you have linked to the correct pages.
- Make sure that the feed links are working fine. All the themes have default feed link. Check that you have correctly linked your feed icon to your feeds.
- After installing, check your blog in different browsers to make sure that there is no alignment issues. You can check IE, Opera, Firefox and Safari. IE has the problem of displaying some CSS weirdly.
- Most of us use scripts for site tracking like Google Analytics or 103bees. Once you install the new theme, check whether you have added these scripts to either header or footer. Last time when I changed my theme, I forgot to add Google code and my site stats were not available for entire week.
- Remove all the unwanted links from the sidebar, as there could be few default links in the sidebar. Also check that you have removed all the unwanted widgets from your sidebar. Also make sure that the plugins are working properly in the new theme (Few theme have in-build plugins). Make necessary changes to the CSS, to make it attractive with the new theme.
So next time you are changing your theme, cross check whether you have done these things properly.
pageRank Does it Matter?
PageRank is a number value that represents the importance of a website on the Internet. Google figures that when a site links to another one, it is casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a site, the more important that site must be!
When I visit a web site, I look at the “PageRank” of the web site. To me PageRank is more of a credibility index than anything. For example, I would feel more confident making a purchase or requesting a service from a web site with a PageRank of 6 than I would from a web site with the PageRank of 2. Therefore I am more likely to convert (try, buy, or recommend) a product, article or service from web site with a higher PageRank.
Google control’s PageRank. They have the final say in what the PageRank of a site would be. It is mostly worked out by a formula. Largely unknown by the public. A basic rule of thumb is that the more links you have to your site the better your PageRank would be.
