Page Rank Change

[StuW]

I am a web designer who, before retirement, worked for a corp in San Jose and published 200+ pages that were proprietary to the company. They existed on an Intranet site behind a firewall. I never had to contend with Internet Search Engines so PR never was an issue.

Since leaving the company, I started doing web design from a small town in Texas. When I first published my site, Google gave me a PR of 3. In an effort to increase that I renamed several pages, splitting the names with hyphens rather than leaving the words run together. All pages except index.html were renamed and all now have a PR of Zero.

That has been about 2 months ago. My host site tells me that Google has crawled my site many time since then, but none of the other pages came back up from the zero ranking.

Is there anything I can do to rectify this? I'm very new to SEO but am anxious to learn.

My site is http://www.spwwebwork.com. I have been adding pages and changing text and layout on a daily basis. Nothing seems to help. I'd appreciate your replies.

[ronniethedodger]

Every time you changed the actual filename of the page, Google thinks it is a new page. You will have to wait for it to reindex and assign a PR to it.

I am showing a PR of 3 for your Index page. Google is not showing the other pages yet due to your recent renaming. Give it a little time and they should come up....stop renaming em dude!!! ;0)

Also Google is showing one linkback from Woody Acres. Other engines are reporting more. In fact AllTheWeb is showing more linkbacks without the www. prefix in the linkback than with it. You should be consistant when exchanging links that your site is always prefixed with the .www or without it....but not both. The preferred method is to always use it. It will take Google some time to equate the two as being the same site...but it will eventually.

I would also work on more inbound link exchanges. The more the merrier, as long as they are not affiliated with any linking pools or FFA's. Go for quality over quantity...and never stop going for em. Keep plugging away at it, and your PR will go higher.

[StuW]

Thank you for your timely reply and good advice. I am certainly not going to rename my pages anymore. I only did it to separate names like 'AboutUs.htm' to be 'About-Us-Affordable-Web-Design.htm' because of advice from an unnamed SEO Expert. I was told to keep the words separate and if possible include some keyword descriptions. Oh Well!!

[StuW]

I would also work on more inbound link exchanges. The more the merrier, as long as they are not affiliated with any linking pools or FFA's. Go for quality over quantity...and never stop going for em. Keep plugging away at it, and your PR will go higher.

Ronnie,

Sorry, I forgot to include this. How do I identify a site with an affiliation to a 'linking pool' or 'FFA'? Oh yes, and what is 'FFA'? Forgive my ignorance, as I am relatively new to this part of the industry. My past employment was designing Intranet pages. Never had to worry about anything outside of our firewall. Now I'm outside and confused.

[ronniethedodger]

You can identify the linking pools (also known as link farms) by looking down at the bottom of the pages in the footer area. If there are words like "Powered by MegaLinks" or some such thing...then they are in with a scheme designed to boost your links with any regard to what type of site they are. One of the more notable ones are Links4Trade and has a little graphic with a heart in it.

Look at their links pages also. If they have hundreds and hundreds of links to sites that are not related to their type of site, chances are they are involved in some type of link farming.

Here is a pretty decent article about link farming and the spamming issue in regards to using them at NetMechanic:

http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/promo_no7.htm

Here is a search for link farm spamming at Google if you are interested in learning more.

FFA stands for Free For All. This is where you can submit your link and it goes onto the page, no reciprocation is necessary. This is similar to signing guestbooks just to get your link out there.

It is said that an inbound link cannot harm you if you do not reciprocate, but you are surrounded by numerous links that have no relation to yours. They do you little good in the long run and are a waste of effort and time.

[StuW]

Ron,

Again, thank you. You help is very valuable to me. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain things. There now seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel and I'm pretty sure it's not a train.

[ronniethedodger]

There now seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel and I'm pretty sure it's not a train.

No, but it might be a car that doesn't know it is on the train tracks. ;0)

[StuW]

You should be consistant when exchanging links that your site is always prefixed with the .www or without it....but not both. The preferred method is to always use it. It will take Google some time to equate the two as being the same site...but it will eventually.

Today, all my pages went to a PR 0. Couldn't figure it out. Eventually, went to my site off of a link from another site and there I was, back up to 3. I enter my url with www. and get zip. Enter it without the www. and get 3 again. How long does it take for Google to figure this out? I changed my url's to include www. a week ago. Google crawled me twice since then and today the PR went to 0.

[Mel]

HI Stu PR and links are not updated at the same time as the general index, but more like once a month.

It may be a while before Google gets it right but if you just changed the format of your links, then a little patience is required while google gets them all indexed and recalculates the PR for all pages in its index.

[StuW]

Thanks again for you timely response. This forum is great. Glad I joined.