We have pagerank 0…and I’m not sure I care
beingzoe 2 months ago // 3 responses // Digital Life Tips, tricks, and advice

Google.

The name conjures mythical stories of the American dream gone right. It inspires hopes of a better more ethical world. It means relevant search results. It represents new ways of doing things and challenges our worldview.

Or does it?

I have respected Google for a long time for many reasons. On the surface at least, they represent everything I wish most companies, and especially corporations were. Google seems to be setting the bar higher and raising the expectations for life, or at least information and interaction in the 21st century. And they certainly have the clout and the money to do it.

Case study in stumbling towards a pagerank 0 site

However, after first brainstorming what was to become the CoTradeCo Trading Post & Community site you are on, less than a year ago, and launching the current incarnation less than 6 months ago, I have had the opportunity to see Google in a whole new light.

As a web designer I have been well familiar with the Google best practices and all manner of rudimentary SEO for some time. My clients however were not paying me for SEO so I always did my best to simply ensure that new sites launched with their best foot forward though not performing any intense SEO. That changed with CoTradeCo. As a principal partner in an online venture, I found myself with a vested interest to fill the holes in my marketing and SEO knowledge.

Over the past months I have studied and researched the ways of the Google and their expectations because let’s face facts, if you aren’t Google you don’t exist.

On that note I am pleased. While not at the top for ideal keywords yet, we have chosen to focus on the long tail search through creating a good site with good content with a good service that will justify folks landing here. And it is working slowly but surely. As the site grows, so do our indexed pages in Google, even if still mostly supplemental, and with it our traffic. And even with meager traffic our communities are slowly growing and our trading post catalog receives a disproportionate number of inquiries and orders. And I thank Google for it.

Pagerank-itus, or how I started worrying about the bomb

But then, like many in SEO, I found myself obsessed with the notion of pagerank. Pagerank (PR), for the unitiated (though I can’t imagine who hasn’t heard of pagerank by now) is Google’s system for determining the popularity and general value/relevancy based on who is linking to a given site. If millions of sites link to your site to something relevant on your site, it tells Googlebot that this page must be important and relevant.

At least so the theory goes. Unfortunately the less scrupulous, and not just black hat SEO, understood the theory and ran with it. The once popular link exchanges of the early days (circa 1998) found new popularity as everyone sought the golden links to their site to get the sacred pagerank 10.

Let’s step back for a moment though and look at what pagerank is according to Google :

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software…the heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders…PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools. ... In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

And you can get a broad view of pagerank, the good the bad and the ugly, at the Wiki .

All this talk of pagerank, and how to get it, leads to inspiring dialogs in Google Groups such as:

I am not talking about positioning in SERP. Any monkey knows that a given PR does not ensure a top placement in the SERP. (original conversation)

The fact is that Google claims that your 1-10 PR value that everybody is looking at in their toolbar all the time has a very small impact on whether or not your sites pages will appear in SERPs. And our small slowly growing site appears to demonstrate that.

As I stated at in the title of this article, we have a pagerank 0. Until recently we had no pagerank at all, which I took as normal for a new site. And since we have launched we have bent over backwards to not only follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines but make the site accessible for all browsers and types of people, and generally care that we are contributing something to the internet. We spent well over a week to implement our own single-sign on solution for sites that wanted to share our community technology after a redirect problem was discovered. While linking to the posts in our community blog in numerous places we have been judicious in ensuring that we provide no duplicate content or carelessly multiple paths to the same content. We have methodically attempted to robots.txt any page or section that would be considered noise both by us and Google from SERPs, going so far as to hand remove pages and sections we missed the first time around. The list goes on. Have we been perfect? Do we have more to do? Hell yeah. But for the sake of Google we have avoided and altered plans that seemed like good ideas for our business and visitors because it is not a best practice. We have rewritten much of the site and code to ensure that we comply as best we can considering the generally vague criteria and answers Google gives on what exactly the criteria is.

And for the most part I think we have made a better site because of it, and will continue to grow and improve.

When good Googlers turn bad

But one of our missions when creating CoTradeCo was to not just start yet another online retail site, or yet another social networking site, or yet another product review site. We wanted to help people while we helped ourselves. The CoTradeCo rhetoric of the NEW TIME trading post, and being a place to not only buy things you might need, but a place where you can share, promote, and learn with your own SPOT is a real commitment to where we are going and what we are doing.

And part of letting people promote themselves was by letting them link to their own dang website. Not just for the direct exposure they would receive from participating in our communities, but the so-called Google-juice that comes from one site linking to another. Like Google, CoTradeCo believes in honesty and integrity, and creating a culture where that can flourish. Sadly, while pagerank may have been a noble idea, and method of assigning value and relevance, I don’t believe it is that anymore when you can find instructional bits of wisdom such as this at webworkshop.net :

Outbound links are a drain on a site’s total PageRank. They leak PageRank. To counter the drain, try to ensure that the links are reciprocated. Because of the PageRank of the pages at each end of an external link, and the number of links out from those pages, reciprocal links can gain or lose PageRank. You need to take care when choosing where to exchange links.

I read a paragraph like that I just see the future of our dream at CoTradeCo hemorrhaging out all over the floor into a bloody pile of failure with every link I alone add to everyone of my posts, including photo credits, useful citations, anecdotal evidence, to demonstrate a point, and just for fun. And when I think of all the links you and everybody else are adding the scene becomes a grotesque.

To follow or not to follow. That is the question.

In all of the decisions we have made to follow or not follow the letter of the Google Guidelines law, the non-standard link attribute rel=”nofollow” was one we chose to ignore. Yes we chose voluntarily to consider links from “user” submitted content to count proudly as a vote from our site to theirs (of course I would never refer to you, gentle reader, as a user, but everybody else does). More importantly, because we take care to keep spam off our site, we pay attention to our visitors and what they are posting (admittedly still simple since we are so small) and it never occurred to me that we would essentially be mandated.

While it has been stated many times that pagerank 0 is not always or necessarily a penalty, to the best of my knowledge Google introduced PR 0 for that very purpose. A gentle penalty if you will that says, “Hey you aren’t doing anything bad enough to black list you, but yeah, you need to change what you are doing.”

So when CoTradeCo went from no PR (expected from a new site, new domain, new company) to a PR 0 I just about died. Despite the continued and ever increasing exposure in SERPs and the knowledge that pagerank itself is not as important to Google’s overall criteria for relevant results, this moment of no page rank to zero page rank nearly killed me. After trying so hard to do everything right, to be a good netizen, and just generally caring and avoiding all the slimier tactics many companies use to get business on and offline, Google essentially said, “screw you.”

As you can well imagine I have stewed on this for a while now. And while we are about to implement rel=”nofollow” for all new and existing CoTradeCo visitors, we are already considering how and when we will lift that linking limitation for trusted community members including myself. Links from our site, including from our visitors are relevant for the purpose they are there, and I continue to see no reason why I should have to add non-standard code (I say that as if we are 100%) to essentially discount the perceived value of a link.

About here we quit caring

But the fact is, I don’t think I care anymore. Oh sure, I will continue to play the game. A small company with passion, values, and ethics such as ourselves can’t afford not to. But I don’t think I am going to play the game so hard or take it so seriously. All of us at CoTradeCo believe in what we are doing, and gosh darn it we are good people. And quite frankly I’m tired of reading the endless stories of people who made mistakes when starting their online venture and are still paying the price in Google SERPs (or lack thereof).

There are still more items on my list to check and verify that we are in good standing and practicing “best” for Google, and I am sure I will find lot’s more things we are doing “wrong.” But I’m not a spammer. We do not indulge ourselves in shady or misleading practices. We are building a fine online resource and I refuse to beat myself up or be punished because we are small and taking things slowly, and learning as we go as it were.

Oh how we sin

The reality is I have no proof that the rel=”nofollow” is the cause of our PR 0. Maybe it’s the extra page redirect from our single-sign on code for our partnered sites. Maybe it’s the partnered sites themselves. Maybe it’s the snippets of duplicate product description that can also be found on some of our vendors sites (and everyone else who sells that particular item – though we do attempt to rewrite everything, but did I mention that we are a small company doing our best?). Maybe it’s the fact that Google can’t find any similar pages to ours because having a store and a community is such a revolutionary concept. Maybe it’s because our html doesn’t always validate 100% (we do try though and are constantly cleaning and fixing as we grow, but I did mention that we are a small company right?). Maybe it’s the classified ads I have experimented with. Maybe it’s the not obvious link/category hierarchy in our url scheme (which is derived from logical Rails routes). Maybe it’s the lack of money for a focus group to figure out how to make the ultimate UI for our mad capped and ever evolving trading post. Maybe it’s the body class assigned by useragent to help with cross browser CSS and scripting. Maybe it’s just bad design. Maybe our page weight is too high. Maybe our pages load to slow. Maybe it’s the hidden div content for our tabbed content. Maybe it’s because I bought a link in a directory on a web developer/marketing forum I wanted to support and also get an extra link back to our site. Maybe it’s the because as a point of reference and example in a scathing article attacking those who buy domains just to put link farms and ad directories on them, I actually linked to one of those “bad neighborhood” sites (dumb I know, but at the time it made sense at the time to demonstrate how insidiously innocent these sites can appear, but resulted in being able to watch hundreds of our pages vanish from the index as if on a counter over the next few days – true story). Maybe it’s because one of our competitors (who seem to have decent enough pagerank while clearly defying certain Google best practices) reporting us to Google for supposed spam behavior out of spite for the newcomers. Maybe it’s because in just being me, ranting, writing, and talking too much like I do, this very paragraph could be construed as keyword stuffing and blog baiting (that occurred to me only now as I reread the paragrah, but instead of editing for clarity what do I do but add yet another sentence to share the revelation).

Or maybe it’s just because we have very few sites linking to us right now, and the ones that do all have rel=”nofollow” on the links to us.

More to come…what’s your story?

I will continue to post on this and related subjects as time permits (I mentioned that we are a small company right?) to keep you abreast of whether or not once again submitting to the will of the almighty and revered Google will eventually yield some coveted pagerank. But more importantly I am going to also share with you the things we are not doing, the things we are defying, and discuss with you the implications of that rebellion in the hopes of finding honest compatriots who are dealing with the same thing.

Of course, when we quit showing up in Google, and our organic search drops to nothing (who counts Yahoo or AOL anymore ;) maybe I’ll change my tune, or maybe I will take it as a sign that I need to give up on the current “way of things” and join the revolution. Because if I can’t even live up to the standards and expectations of a fair and ethical company like Google in an effort to compete and participate in a supposedly open market, then I’m just going to be eaten alive by the vast majority who seem to find nothing wrong with bending and breaking all the rules.

If you have experienced any of this gut wrenching torment yourself I would love to hear about it. Share your thoughts at CoTradeCo, and feel free to link to your site. Someday it won’t have rel=”nofollow” on it.

God vs Google’s trademark lawyers image courtesy of zimpenfish at Flickr under a creative commons license.

You may also be interested in my follow up post

• Pagerank 3??? The Googles must be crazy…