Page Rank is almost entirely a function of the number and quality of links. All that other stuff only distinguishes your keywords *after* you’re ranked. (I realize that may be oversimplifying it a bit). And if you’re talking about Google, meta tags make no difference – Google only reads real text viewable by your users.
WordPress is extremely friendly to search engines, right out of the box. “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” is the rule to follow, as adding a lot of spammy features to WordPress could hurt lots of already successful users and wouldn’t help anyone.
Getting a good Page Rank. A link from a Page Rank 6 site is usually suffificient to get you to a PR of 4. Aside from that, you need to produce good quality content that people will link to. There’s just no substitute for slow and steady link building the natural way.
Your site has a PR of 5, by the way. Should have checked that before answering. You don’t have any problem. Your posts are unranked because you are using the custom permalinks. If you used the out of the box “?p=1? style permalinks your posts would also have a PR of 5.
>>>Your posts are unranked because you are using the custom permalinks. If you used the out of the box “?p=1? style permalinks your posts would also have a PR of 5.<<<
Could you explain this a little more?
IMO, using permalinks is better as Google will only process X links per site that have a ? in them to prevent it’s bot from getting stuck in a loop.
While posts using permalinks won’t be dragged up the page rank list with your site, they’ll get their own page rank for their own content in their own right.
Or at least that’s my understanding and experience.
Yes. My experience, on a site with 800+ posts as well as a couple of smaller sites, is that every post and page gains the same Page Rank as the home page if you use the out of the box permalinks instead of the “custom”. My hunch is that this is because of the custom permalinks creating what looks like a subdirectory structure (all those slashes) so that the permalinked pages appear to be outside the root folder, but that’s just a guess.
I was stuck with that, as custom permalinks caused so many problems on my server that I gave up early on and then discovered by accident that while all my posts have a PR of 5, many custom permalink sites’ posts are completely unranked.
I will probably stop sharing this soon when I realize it gives me an advantage over all these folks that are using those custom permalinks thinking it will actually help. But that hasn’t hit me just yet.
Page rank = quality of inbound links, it has nothing to do with your amount of content.
“If you used the out of the box “?p=1? style permalinks your posts would also have a PR of 5.”
The above is completely incorrect. Google treats each page individually, PR strength leaks from link to link, so lets say you have a main page with PR6, and you have only 3 links on that page, there is a chance that each of these 2 links will now become PR2-3, but put 100 links on your main page and most likely they will all be PR0-1
The only way you will get PR for your content pages is if people link to those pages DIRECTLY.
Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
Sorry, dean, I think you misunderstood me. Quality content DRAWS links. That builds Page Rank.
As for your second point, no, you are completely incorrect. That may be a nice theory, but empirically (that means in the real world) the theory doesn’t hold water. WordPress blogs using the default permalink structure with WordPress installed in the root directory share the main pages Page Rank with all posts. I can point you to half a dozen examples. But I’m tired of arguing with people about it. Like I said, do your thing and I’ll get better results because you don’t believe me.
I guess if I was gonna be really p!ssy about it, I’d note your excellent PR of zero with all posts unranked. But I won’t.
Remember, folks, Page Rank is just one ephemeral idea on the internet. Having a large Page Rank doesn’t make you a better person, nor does it demonstrably benefit society.
LOL. Good point. Sorry, I lost patience a bit with the “that is completely incorrect” know-it-all tone.
> Having a large Page Rank doesn’t make you a better person, nor does it demonstrably benefit society.
Nor does it guarantee any page a high ranking in Google. There are plenty of examples of lower PR pages outranking high-PR pages — and loads of posts around forums asking why their higher-PR page is outranked mightily by lower-RP pages. Thus, buying into the idea that PageRank alone guarantees good rankings ignores the far larger picture. 😉
Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
So, in summary, Page Rank means “diddly squat”.
“So in summary page rank = one of the largest factors for ranking well in google.”
Personally i feel quality links and excellent content are the only 2 things more important. To bring up a few points:
“Sorry, dean, I think you misunderstood me. Quality content DRAWS links. That builds Page Rank.” True, i agree 100% with that.
“WordPress blogs using the default permalink structure with WordPress installed in the root directory share the main pages Page Rank with all posts. I can point you to half a dozen examples” I would love to see these half a dozen examples please, i hope you are right on this, but i doubt very much you are.”
“I guess if I was gonna be really p!ssy about it, I’d note your excellent PR of zero with all posts unranked. But I won’t” You dont even know my url, and my site is 6 days old, so i wont get any PR until the next update.
“So, in summary, Page Rank means “diddly squat” If only everyone thought the same, it would make my job sooo much easier.
ok, i have just realised that of course you know my URL, silly me.
Anyway, I hope you dont mind me posting this Tom, but i just checked and your main page is PR5, but i randomly picked 2 other threads from the same site and they were Pr3 and Pr2.
I am not saying your theory is not correct, but i would be keen to see an example please.
Thanks.
http://www.tom-hanna.org/ PR5
http://www.tom-hanna.org/?p=843 PR0
http://www.tom-hanna.org/?p=850 PR0
http://www.tom-hanna.org/?p=846 PR0
http://www.tom-hanna.org/?p=841 PR0
http://www.tom-hanna.org/?p=840 PR0
http://www.tom-hanna.org/?p=837 PR0
http://www.tom-hanna.org/?p=831 PR0
This is the site you used as your example in another thread, all articles i checked were PR0 except one which was PR3. Maybe you could show me some other examples? Again, i must stress I am not trying to prove you wrong, infact i hope you are right.
Where are you getting your numbers? I have two different toolbar plugins on Firefox and they are both showing something completely different on my site and on yours. I really don’t want to continue in a p!ssing match about it, though. And I don’t mind you posting my URL at all. Post it anywhere you want, as long as it’s not a ‘bad neighborhood.’ 😉
Bottom line, though, my point is that WordPress performs superbly without messing with the custom permalinks, for example, and in many cases they seem to cause more problems than they solve, interfering with plugins and whatnot.
The best solution isn’t to be worrying about Page Rank, but to produce content that people will want to link to. Producing the kind of content that leads to good incoming links is going to contribute more to good results than your permalink structure or meta tags. Beyond content, I’d focus on keywords in categories, post and page titles and domain names.
