Home Page PR - 0, News&Contacts PR - 3

[ksu]

I started promoting our site only a month ago. Until today we had PR of 0 on every single page. Today I was surprised by a PR of 3 on our News and Contact pages, all the rest remained with PR 0. I am kind of confused. I am promoting Home and Mobile & Wireless pages, and didn't even think of promoting News and Contacts. How could this mess happen? Any thoughts?

[michalm]

Your home page http://www.ctgroup.biz has a PR3, but it is redirected to http://www.ctgroup.biz/home.jsp which has PR0. The redirect is probably in javascript which won't be followed by spiders (at least not easily)
Did you look at your <title> tag. It's way too long.

[Mel]

HI Ksu
If you want your home page indexed for a particular set of keywords or phrases you are going to have to optimize the page for those phrases.

Start with your page title which at the moment is 1997 characters long and a great many of those characters are &nbsp.

I would recommend using not more than 60 characters in your page title and include only the two or three keyphrases you are going to target for that page, written up so as to make a compelling sentence to cause SERP viewers to click through to your page.

Then I would recommend changing the
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=koi8-r"> to a Western character set, as I suspect that googlebot might think this page is not is English when it sees that tag.

Then read up on some basix Search engine optimization and ask questions here.

[ksu]

Yes, I am aware of the title tag mess. We are still waiting for our web developer to change it :).
Question: how did you check that www.ctgroup.biz has a PR3? Also, is it theoretically possible to stop the redirect?

[Mel]

Your server is returing a 302 redirect to your homepage at home.jsp. I suspect that the redirect is used because your home page is not using one of the names (like index.jsp) Apache associates automatically with the default page. Why not just rename your page and get rid of the unnecessary redirect?

Alternatively you should be able to set up Apache to recognize home.jsp as a the default and get rid of the 302.

[ksu]

After we rename the page, will we lose anything out of it, or to the contrary gain the PR3 on our home page?

[Mel]

Since you have a PR0 at present there is not much to lose, and you should have whatever PR is due the page. Just make sure that all your links point to your base URL not the page.