stuck at PR0

[texcited]

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on why my site, http://www.gardenoutfitters.com still has a PR0? I have numerous links directed at my site, and I think I'm following all of the rules. I have numerous other sites that have decent page rankings, but this one seems stuck at 0. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks,
-texcited

[mm99]

I took a careful look and everything seems to be in order. I googed your site for links and found 0. I did a meta search and you were in the very good range. The reason your're having a pr problem is because you don't have anyone sig linking to you.

A possible solution would be to throw a link on your other sites that are doing well, and that should increase your pr on the site in question.

peace...Paul

[ronniethedodger]

I don't know what mm99 was looking at, but Google has quite a few links they are aware of that are linking back to your site. Over a 100 of them at least. But they are just not showing up in the link: query.

Plus AllTheWeb is reporting 171. You also have Yahoo directory listings as well as two DMOZ listings. So there is no problem with linkbacks.

Why Google is not reporting them with the link: query is unusual. Especially when you have so many of them.

By the way...this image is missing from your site http://www.gardenoutfitters.com/gologonew2.gif . It was referenced at http://shop.solardirect.com/links.php?lPath=6 and you are getting the little red X for that image.

How long has your site been up? WhoIs says that you registered the name February last year.

Has your site ever had any PR at all?

Have you been crawled by Googlebot yet (look at your logs)? A search at Google does not reveal any pages in it's index yet.

Your site is not ZERO according to my Googlebar, it is BLANK....not ranked yet.

Do you have any relation to these sites?

• www.Fenced-in.net
  www.Fencesupply.net
  www.Gardenoutfitters.com
  www.Lockcart.com
  www.Outdoorfence.com
  www.Stanco-inc.com
  www.Stanco-inc.net
  www.Stancogarden.com
  www.Stancovinylfence.com
  www.Thefencestore.net

If so...how are they doing?

[jackson992]

I have noticed that running the utility for multiple search engines as well. Googles seems to be really low compared to all others. Just do a search on one of my domains and you should see what I mean.

P.S.

What do you guys use to look at your logs. I tried viewing one in notepad and it was a mess

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by jackson992

I have noticed that running the utility for multiple search engines as well. Googles seems to be really low compared to all others. Just do a search on one of my domains and you should see what I mean.

Google is always lower. It is only a representative sample of the links that they have indexed for any given site. They do not show a majority of them with the site: query.

If you want to know what Google is aware of then do this query at Google ---> +"www.domain.com" with the quotes and the + sign.

For analyzing server log files people use software that will do that for them. A popular highly recommended Open Source analyzer is AWStats which is a free download.

I use a commercial analyzer myself called Sawmill.

[mm99]

When you are talking about links to your site, if you use the "links:bla bla bla" it shows nothiing. This is because goog will not bother listing anything that does not have page rank that is low. What ronniethedodger is refering to (perhaps) is typing your url into the locater and your utl will come up by itself. If you then click:

"Find web pages that contain the term "gardenoutfitters.com""

you will see a whole bunch of stuff. They don't count them as links to the site, you simply did a search and it found you listed any number of places.

peace...Paul

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by mm99

you will see a whole bunch of stuff. They don't count them as links to the site, you simply did a search and it found you listed any number of places.

Those are linkbacks either way you look at it. And a lot of them match up with the links that ATW is showing to. And the search shows that Google is aware of those links.

Google does not report all links. There is a cutoff that some say is based on the PR of the page, but nobody really knows that. Then some theorize that they only show a certain percentage of those links. The plain fact is they show us only what they want to, and the reason is not as you put it "They don't count them as links to the site, you simply did a search and it found you listed any number of places" which is absolutely not true.

Just because they do not show up in the link: query does not mean that Google does not consider them links. They do consider them as links.

All of that is a moot point in this person's case anyway and you are not helping in determining what his problem is.

The problem is that he is not indexed at Google at all....and therefore the traditional link: query will not work. To Google (from what I can see) this site does not exist in it's index.

[jackson992]

What is the purpose of the thing he has in his meta robots tag? I'm not familiar with that

[ronniethedodger]

<meta NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">

It instructs the robot to index the page and to follow all links on the page. It is actually not required because the default behaviour of all robots is to index and follow anyway.

[fathom]

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

<meta NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">

It instructs the robot to index the page and to follow all links on the page. It is actually not required because the default behaviour of all robots is to index and follow anyway.

To add to ronniethedodger comments -- it is useful when deleting/moving pages by using "noindex, follow" before changes are made so Google will drop the URL and visitors will not see a 404 error.

[Mel]

You have a great site but for some reason Google has only indexed one of your pages, the home page and your site has a PR of zero, which is indicative of problems.
Looking closer an allinurl:gardenoutfitters.com search shows one page in the Google index, but a regular search for your URL says:

Sorry, no information is available for the URL gardenoutfitters.com

which taken together with your PR0 looks like a penalty to me.

First the indexing problem.
Your site spiders just fine and the only apparent problem I can see on your home page is that your expires meta tag is malformed.

The expires tag requires an RFC1123 date in the format:
"Tue, 01 Jun 1999 19:58:02 GMT" rather than the "-1" you are using now.

The Expires Meta Tag is most often used to control caching but is sometimes used by search engines as a means to indicate a fixed date when they should remove your page from their database, so I suppose this could be a part of your problem in that you have indicated that the pages should be removed some time in the past.

Not at all sure if this will help, but it won't hurt to fix the tag.

Next the PRO problem.

There are many sites that have apparent links to your site (something like 170) but many if not most of them are not links that the search engines will recognize.

As an example your link from sunshelf.com/gardenlinks.htm appears to viewers as a normal link but the URL is actually:
http://www.gardenoutfitters.com

Note that your URL is only text not a hyperlink and the actual link goes to sunshelf.

Still you have a link from joeant that is valid and should be sufficient to get you spidered, so it appears to me that there may be some kind of penalty in place on your site.

I suggest that you might go through all your outbound links with a finetooth comb to make sure you aren't linking to a penalized (PR0) site. You do have one link that I found which is to a site with a PR0.

Do you by any chance have multiple sites with duplicate content, or which are extensively linked together?

[texcited]

Thanks for all of the help so far people, here are some answers to questions you've asked:

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

How long has your site been up? WhoIs says that you registered the name February last year.

I've been up since February just like it shows in WhoIs.

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

Has your site ever had any PR at all?

I have never had any page rank for this site yet.

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

Do you have any relation to these sites?

• www.Fenced-in.net
  www.Fencesupply.net
  www.Gardenoutfitters.com
  www.Lockcart.com
  www.Outdoorfence.com
  www.Stanco-inc.com
  www.Stanco-inc.net
  www.Stancogarden.com
  www.Stancovinylfence.com
  www.Thefencestore.net

If so...how are they doing?

These sites are all related to me and linked together well. I don't think that they are linked too extensively to cause penalties, plus most of these site have decent page ranks.

Originally Posted by Mel

Do you by any chance have multiple sites with duplicate content, or which are extensively linked together?

I have quite a few sites out there, but none of them are mirrors of each other. They are all linked together though. Some URL's like www.thefencestore.net is a pointer to www.gardenoutfitters.com, but I don't think that would cause any problems.

Thanks a million for all of your suggestions! Any more help would be appreciated.
-Texcited

[mm99]

To clarify what I stated earlier, when you do the link search in goog, it will only list links of 3 or 4 PR or better. This does not mean that goog does not see others that are lower, it just does not list them and they don't count for much of anythng anyway.

If you do a search across multiple ses, you will see far more in the other ses. I recall, for example, one of ny sites only showed 9 links to it in goog and I think it was 29 in either atw or av, I think it was av.

Re the robots tags: I now include them in all my sites. Some of the ses will not spider your site if you don't have them. Inktomi has a stated policy that they will not spider a site that does not have them, and they are very important se. They are important to getting you listed in MSN and some of the more popular non US types like Ask Jeeves.

peace...Paul

[Mel]

HI Paul
While you may be of the opinion that links from PR3 and lower sites "don't count for much of anything anyway" my experience and opinion is quite the opposite.

Google counts all inbound links in its PR calculations and the fact is that ten links from high PR3 pages that Google does not display may affect your PR more than five links from low PR4 pages which Google does display.

More importantly, the ranking contributions of anchor text in links is very important to good rankings at Google, so important that you can get an #1 ranking soley on the strength of anchor text. The ranking contribution of anchor text is in no way related to PR and thus all anchor text is important.

Can you please point me to the links where Inktomi has said it will not spider sites without robots tags? Same for your assertations regarding getting spidered by others?

I find it hard to believe that spiders will not crawl a site without a robots meta tag as the default action for no robots tag is INDEX/FOLLOW.

Other authorities seem to agree. Danny Sullivan has this to say about the robots tag:

You do NOT need to use variations of the meta robots tag to help your pages get indexed. They are unnecessary. By default, a crawler will try to index all your web pages and will try to follow links from one page to another

Back to personal experience I just checked one of my clients sites (who we are optimizing for Inktomi) and as of today there are 492 of his pages listed in Inktomi, none of which have a robots tag.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by texcited

These sites are all related to me and linked together well. I don't think that they are linked too extensively to cause penalties, plus most of these site have decent page ranks.

I have quite a few sites out there, but none of them are mirrors of each other. They are all linked together though. Some URL's like www.thefencestore.net is a pointer to www.gardenoutfitters.com, but I don't think that would cause any problems.

All of the url's I listed are from a Reverse IP check that I did on your site. All of these sites are on the same IP and they are linked together.

It is my opinion that Google crawls by IP address and not by Domain name. The reason it is easier to store the IP address and use it's own internal lookup database.

And even if it did not, it is also known that SE's (not just Google) will analyze the linking of sites to see if they are in the same Class 3 IP Block of addresses, of which yours definitely is...and it is the same IP address to boot.

This is a tactic of spammers to artificially boost their PR with cross linking in this manner. Although they have been moving their linked sites onto seperate servers now (thus different Class 3 IP blocks) to avoid detection...the stigma still remains.

It is possible that you have recieved such a penalty for linking in this manner.

I would suggest that you remove all links from the the sites that I listed that point to www.gardenoutfitters.com.

While you are waiting, I also suggest that you might do as what Mel suggested:

I suggest that you might go through all your outbound links with a finetooth comb to make sure you aren't linking to a penalized (PR0) site. You do have one link that I found which is to a site with a PR0.

I would like to add to that....if these are link exchange partners, dropping their link would make a bad impression if they are not penalized themselves. You may want to "script" the link so it is not spiderable until you have time to determine whether they are actually penalized or not.

This will keep you busy until googlebot returns. It may take a while, still, for it will have to spider the other sites and recognize that this linking practice does not exist any more.

This may also be a house of cards too, for it might knock another one of those sites down to 0 also.

Overall you may want to reanalyze your cross-linking strategy.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Mel

I find it hard to believe that spiders will not crawl a site without a robots meta tag as the default action for no robots tag is INDEX/FOLLOW.

I find that hard to believe too.

That Meta tag is a throwback from years ago when Server Hosts did not allow the uploading of a robots.txt file when it was first put into use. So the Meta Tag was created so the website developer could insert exclusions into the actual file.

Ironically, the tag was created in the beginning with the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW arguments only. The other two came later as did a couple others.

Today the robots.txt file is the preferred method to use. Virtually all robots obey this file....while a large portion of them don't bother to check the Meta tag.

[Mel]

Originally Posted by texcited

Thanks for all of the help so far people, here are some answers to questions you've asked:...

I have quite a few sites out there, but none of them are mirrors of each other. They are all linked together though. Some URL's like www.thefencestore.net is a pointer to www.gardenoutfitters.com, but I don't think that would cause any problems.

• www.Fenced-in.net
  www.Fencesupply.net
  www.Gardenoutfitters.com
  www.Lockcart.com
  www.Outdoorfence.com
  www.Stanco-inc.com
  www.Stanco-inc.net
  www.Stancogarden.com
  www.Stancovinylfence.com
  www.Thefencestore.net

Thanks a million for all of your suggestions! Any more help would be appreciated.

-Texcited

Hi Texcited:

here is what I am seeing with your group of sites at IP 64.42.104.250

• www.Fenced-in.net redirects to gardenoutfitters.com
  
  www.Fencesupply.net redirects to gardenoutfitters.com
  
  www.Gardenoutfitters.com standalone with a PR0
  
  www.Lockcart.com is a mirror site to Gardenoutfitters.com with a PR0
  
  www.Outdoorfence.com stands on its own with a PR of 4 and links to gardenoutfitters.com
  
  www.Stanco-inc.com stands on its own with a PR of 4 and links to gardenoutfitters.com
  
  www.Stanco-inc.net stands on its own with a PR of 4 and links to gardenoutfitters.com but looks like a mirror page to sranco-inc.com
  
  www.Stancogarden.com stands on its own with a PR of 4 and links to gardenoutfitters.com but looks like a mirror page to stanco-inc.com
  
  www.Stancovinylfence.com stands on its own with a PR of 4 and links to gardenoutfitters.com but looks like a mirror page to stanco-inc.com etc
  
  www.Thefencestore.net redirects to gardenoutfitters.com

You should check your sites and insure that you do not have mirror pages, especially at the same IP address

[texcited]

Thanks to everyone who gave me some ideas of why I might be stuck at a PR of zero. I'm going to work on fixing a lot of these issues right away. I really think I got some great advice and I hope it works! Thanks a million!
-Texcited

[Meenal]

I am finding similar problem with one of my sites, http://www.singleshunt.com. The main page of this site, http://www.singleshunt.com/main/index.asp (as well as all other pages) always had pr=0.Any suggestions would be a great help!

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Meenal

I am finding similar problem with one of my sites, http://www.singleshunt.com. The main page of this site, http://www.singleshunt.com/main/index.asp (as well as all other pages) always had pr=0.Any suggestions would be a great help!

Your server is down and so is your registrar service. If this is a common thing for your host service to be down, then that would be a problem with you getting properly indexed by any search engine.

You also appear to have 308 other sites on the same IP address similar to texcited's situation. I am one not one to get into a situation such as this, and have my sites with their own IP address that is not shared. One of the problems outside of the "guilt by association" is that if any of the sites that are on this single IP address (or a whole bunch of them) get busy with traffic, it will slow down the server response to other traffic --- namely spider traffic.

You get what you pay for with cheap hosting. Paying the extra few bucks a month is well worth the money in the long run and avoiding this type of problem.

I am not sure that is your case here, but it is a good possibility that it is.

[Meenal]

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

Your server is down and so is your registrar service. If this is a common thing for your host service to be down, then that would be a problem with you getting properly indexed by any search engine.

You also appear to have 308 other sites on the same IP address similar to texcited's situation. I am one not one to get into a situation such as this, and have my sites with their own IP address that is not shared. One of the problems outside of the "guilt by association" is that if any of the sites that are on this single IP address (or a whole bunch of them) get busy with traffic, it will slow down the server response to other traffic --- namely spider traffic.

Since i'm new to these concepts, please bear with my questions. But how did you find all this information?
Also please suggest what can be done to sort out this problem.

[ppeter]

Hi

How is this reverse IP check done? I'd like to know what websites I am sharing with. I need to know if I need to move to a dedicated server.

Thanks

[Mel]

I always advise my clients that the first requisite for a website is a rocksolid host and a dedicated IP address.

It costs a bit more for good hosting but solid hosting with dedicated IP addresses can be had for under $15 per month.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Meenal

Since i'm new to these concepts, please bear with my questions. But how did you find all this information?
Also please suggest what can be done to sort out this problem.

I get all of that info from WhoIs Source at http://www.whois.sc/. It requires registration for advanced features such as the Reverse IP search.

I was curious as to why you do not have your home page down in the root of your domain with a regular default index page. You have a redirection on this page to http://www.singleshunt.com/main/index.asp

In addition to what Mel has already mentioned about hosting, you could use more backlinks to your site. More links will give you increased visibility with the search engines.