Pagerank 3??? The Googles must be crazy…
beingzoe 2 months ago // 2 responses // Digital Life Gibber-gabber

Coincidence? Nofollow only appeared yesterday afternoon. Did we even get crawled since then?

I don’t want to start some nofollow epidemic.

There have been stranger coincidences. The home page was officially accessed on April 29, but I don’t believe it.

For example, just the other day, I happened to do a site search to check if a particular page was on Google and in the primary index was a post that Ily had made less than 17 minutes before. And yet, I have never seen the webmaster tools indicate that Googlebot had accessed the home page any more often than about every 4 days.

Even still I don’t feel confident of the pagerank result. Not that I have a problem with starting out with a PR 3, but from my understanding it takes a while for PR to update, typically every three months. While I was able to corroborate the PR 3 on at least 3 tools, the rest still indicated a big fat 0.

However, I have considered that if the PR 0 was in fact a form of penalty, and any action we have taken that Googlebot has the authority to automatically revoke could reveal our true pagerank without having to wait for the next official PR update.

We are talking wild conjecture here though.

But let’s assume rel=”nofollow” was the problem

Assuming PR 3 is proven to be our actual pagerank, and none of our interior pages yet have pagerank, it begs the question: Was the rel=”nofollow” only a major problem for the home page in the eyes of Google because of the inherently higher home pagerank, and we could allow Pagerank to “hemorrhage” on the blog posts and SPOTS without effecting the overall site Pagerank?

Still wondering how much I care

As I discussed in my previous post on this subject, I was beginning to wonder if I cared about our pagerank with Google. Clearly being banished from the graces of Google would be certain disaster, at least in the short term. Yet, with our indexed pages constantly on the rise in the Google index, I had to honestly ask whether it was worth the time and money spent to increase our pagerank.

Only time will tell. With our home page now garnering a nominal pagerank value, I would consider decent for a new site, new company, new domain, coupled with our continued slow growth, will we begin to see a direct increase of traffic from organic Google SERPs.

It will be so hard to tell. With our continued promotional efforts, ever improving original site content, increased sales force for the trading post catalog, and separately growing community, how do we determine accurately whether the PR was a major factor?

For now I am still holding steady on my overall lack of concern for pagerank specifically, but I will not lie and tell you that finally having some isn’t a sigh of relief.