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Does pagerank for a website affect crawling rate?

Pagerank is just a value assigned based on pagerank of other pages linking to it. Crawling rate for a site depends on various other factors and its definitely not pagerank alone. Martin Buster of webmasterworld gives a good explanation of the myths behind pagerank and crawling.

“I can’t be more emphatic about the falseness of this emphasis on PageRank 4. It has to die. If you are going to get ahead you must walk away from this myth. It’s a number that was arrived at in relation to backlink searches many years ago. The situation that gave rise to the myth went away, it ended, but the myth endured. I’ll explain.

History lesson
Many years ago Google used to show the backlinks of sites with a PR of 4 or more. This caused webmasters to make the erroneous assumption that PR 4 is the threshold between a good ranking and a bad ranking, that Google did not count links from -PR4 sites. Otherwise, why didn’t they show them in the backlink searches? It could be said to have been a reasonable assumption but at the time the Googlers were saying this wasn’t the case.

To the webmasters, because Google didn’t show links from sites with less than PR 4, they assumed that -PR4 meant you were crawled less, had less authority, etc. Over PR 4 meant your site had finally arrived.

Then during a London Pubcon DaveN suggested to Matt Cutts that this scheme was inaccurate and Matt Cutts agreed. Not long after he arrived back at the Googleplex their search engine began showing a sample of backlinks across a range of PR.

Stop and examine the facts

Anyone who has ever ranked a site with an under PR 4 site knows that the assumption that -PR 4 is less worthy is an assumption without foundation. Anyone who has watched their rankings jump with – PR4 backlinks understands that the PR 4 threshold is absolutely false.

The superstition continues

So even though Google began showing PR 4 backlinks, to this very day many webmasters still cling to the mistaken notion that PR 4 is a significant threshold. It is not. This belief in the superiority or meaningfulness of PageRank 4 meets the definition of superstition: “A belief in something not justified by reason or evidence.” It’s a myth. The healing powers of PR 4 is a superstition.

So what determines crawling?

What determines crawling is the amount of links you have. Each link is a new door, so to speak, for a bot to find you. One can have thousands and thousands of links and still rank under 4, yet be better and deeper crawled than a PR 4 with less inbound links.”

Age of domains – Importance in search engines:

I’d say the age of domain is one of the top factors in obtaining “authority” status. And then within the age factor are all the other things that determine its age. Change of owners. Change of IPs. Change of Servers. Change of just about everything that takes place within DNS.

I also feel that “stability” in the hosting network is another factor. I feel that anyone who has a serious Internet business is going to have their own IPs and possibly server(s) to do their thing. They won’t be relying on a cheap web host to compete in a market that is reserved for the BIG BOYs. That’s like showing up for a drag race in a Prius or something. 🙂

It is not the “only” factor though. Success takes time. There was a point in Internet history when it “could” happen overnight but that has slowly dwindled to lotto type statistics. You’ll have to invest the time and patience knowing that what you are building is a long term proposition.

Sure, you can open your doors and have success overnight and it still happens. If you have the right product and/or service along with a few strategically placed marketing efforts, you can start the ball rolling. Nature will take its course from there. Yes, things will “naturally” happen as it goes viral. Unfortunately many of us may not reach that level and we’ll continue to work in the trenches, feed our families, and make a decent living off the leftovers. 🙂

Yes, domain age is an important factor in “all” things Internet related. Each year that passes, the value of that domain increases. It’s like fine wine. Since 1995 has a bit of meaning when talking Internet these days. Companies who have been online for any period of time would be wise to start advertising their since dates.

Is excess links from social bookmarking sites harmful?

We get this question from our readers. I believe yes too much of anything is harmful right? If you are into building links from social media sites we need to make sure its done correctly. First of all we need to make sure social media links are not no-followed. No-follow links are not counted by Google. Even if the links are not no followed there are too many links submitted in sites like Digg.com so most of the time it’s not worth doing excess links in social bookmarking sites. Keep in mind, you are building a “link profile” right now. Do you want that profile focused in the Social Media space? If so, you’re on the right track but maybe going about it the wrong way. The way the question reads almost sounds as if you are abusing the Social Media outlets where this stuff was supposedly submitted.

Social bookmarking sites are meant for communities which want to share pages and sites they like on the web I am sure if you want to abuse it then you are in wrong track.

Unable to get rid of potential penalty?

You know your site is penalized. You cleaned up what you thought was the trigger. Filed re-inclusion request. After that you are in the dark. The chances are you never get reincluded-

– Your site might never have had a problem to begin with. It might have been one of those Google’s freak collateral damage issues that landed you in the soup.

– You correctly identified the issue, cleaned it up, filed a request, but you are in the mandatory penalty period, which you don’t know is how long and when will it end.

– You haven’t identified the problem or have partly addressed it and Google wants you to do more, a fact you are not aware of and are waiting endlessly for the penalty to end.

– It might never have been a penalty by Google’s definition, but an algorithmic tweak that has affected a select set of keywords. If the overall traffic hasn’t been affected drastically, perhaps a perceived penalty might belong to this category.

– Your site is affected (penalized or algorithmically tweaked), you undertake damage control efforts, file a request to Google citing what might have been the problem that you addressed, which might be a news to Google! So, they use the stick you gave to beat you.

It might just be best to clean up issues that you are aware of and leave the rest to destiny.
Google penalties are vague and sometimes affect high quality sites I feel best is to go for re-inclusion requests.

Is Google devaluing forums:

Several people have reported that Google is devaluing forums and not indexing them well these days. I did notice something similar in couple of forums we monitor. Google stopped indexing our PHPBB forums. Before it was indexing it every day, all new posts appeared in Google the same day, sometimes with an hour. Now it stopped. It doesn’t index topics at all, and last time it cached the main board page (index.php) was January 30.
My rankings of what is already indexed didn’t drop, the overall position of the site on the generic keywords even improved. And yes, we checked: our board was not hacked, there are no redirects, .htaccess or robots.txt hacks. Webmaster Tool doesn’t display any error messages, everything looks ok. But crawl graphs do show that Google crawls less in January-February than in November-December. It seems like Google just ignores the board now, like it has “better things to crawl”. Which is a pity, because there are tons of important info being posted daily.
We did some research on few of the other PHPBB sites we monitor, and even those boards faces the same situation. I suspect this could just be a temporary glitch with Google. Hope it gets fixed soon.

Yahoo search update February 2009:

Yahoo has done a update to their index and I can see a lot of changes and shuffling of results for my client sites. Most of our client site rankings got boosted this time. Yahoo loves most of our client sites they sometimes act very weird when it come to ranking sites. Their ranking algorithm is the most difficult to rank as well as the most easy at times. There are sites we had been trying for months to rank in yahoo but none of the keywords are in first page but there are few sites which we just do work for a week and from 2nd week it tends to dominate for major keywords.
According to official Yahoo search blog, Sharad Sharma reports that they have done a yahoo search index update and this will affect ranking and indexing of websites. Sharad also mentions they have updated their algorithm this time I am sure it’s a minor changes because way I am seeing across most of our sites and client sites is that there is little or no movement and the few movement we see are all positive and upwards.
http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/27/weather-report-yahoo-search-index-update-19/
According to Ysearchblog.com
“We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We have had two updates since last November: one in December, 2008, and another in late January this year. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.
While we didn’t do Weather Reports for the December and January updates, we heard loud and clear that the community still finds them helpful, so we’ll continue to provide these reports.”
I hope your sites are doing better.
Good luck with update.

Site: operator reporting lesser number of pages.

I am sure if you run a website and actively monitor it you will be aware that sometimes site: operator reports lesser number of results. Site: operator is used to find the number of pages indexed for a particular website for example: site:www.searchenginegenie.com will reveal all the pages that Google indexed for the website searchenginegenie.com .
Few of our clients and some of our external users have reported that site: operator sometimes report lesser number of pages than it usually used to show for their website. Some of the people who come to us with this question are also concerned that this could be another penalty. Ok, from our experience there is no reason to worry if site: operator reports lesser number of pages. This has always been the case Google has 1000s of clusters of computers spread throughout the world in different data centers they have, and not all the datacenters are update some of them have old data some have standard data and some have very fresh data. So when you make a query you tend to hit different datacenters and this will result in you hitting different results so if you see that your indexed pages are showing different don’t worry about that it should just be that you are seeing a different set of results.
But you should be worried in one case if you see consistent drop of your indexed pages over a period of time then there is something you definitely need to worry. See if there is something wrong with your site and in case your site disappears after consistent drop in indexed pages 90% it’s a penalty check for potential penalty in Google webmaster tools. If you find your site is penalized submit for reinclusion. Other than that there is nothing to worry about site: operator.

Google and Brand Authority

A webmaster world member has started a discussion whether Google is giving brand authority to certain results. When you say Brand Authority it means if you are the top brand for that particular search you will be ranking for that term.

For example:

Keyword: Laptop
#1 – Apple
#2 – Dell

Keyword: High Speed Internet
#1 – ATT
#2 – Comcast

Keyword: Quit Smoking
#1 – SmokeFree.gov
#2 – CDC.gov

I have seen this in many cases there are some keywords where a top brand for that keyword ranks even if their website is all flash or just a splash page. Google’s Eric Schmidt has already said there needs to be some sort of Authority / Social Buzz for a top brand to rank. Its not just about onpage factors or offpage factors for top brands if a particular brand is top on a particular search I am sure they will be ranking atleast for Google. I wonder how Google does this they always say their results don’t have manual intervention but it seems to make a top brand rank without proper web popularity should come from some extra ordinary human based algorithm. Most top brands have good offline popularity but not web popularity but still they rank well for their phrases.

Google says its not just about factors influencing the site alone but the social media factor also boosts top brands. Especially this year many users begin to notice brand authority. Probably google has figured out a way to make the top brands rank for their corresponding keywords. The real question are Google users happy to see their top brands on top of Google results for major keywords if yes I don’t think Google need to worry how they get them out there. Users come first and I feel most users are happy to see top brands on top of results for brand related keywords.

Is SEO dead?

When I was going through webmaster world I came across an interesting featured post where the author says SEO is dead and it has been completely replaced by PPC, Social Media Marketing and Link building. Well running an SEO company for more than 5 years I am well aware that SEO has slowed down a bit. But the truth SEO is never dead or no where near to be in death bed. I am sure it will go on for at least 10 more years to come.

Yes I agree that traditional SEO is not there anymore. Now people are more SEO savvy and they are more educated than before. But better education and understanding is actually good for ethical SEO companies like us. We don’t have to explain the whole process of SEO to them. Most client come to us by word of mouth referral and they are still coming because we did a good job for our current and past clients. Traditional SEO is dead for sure people don’t seek us to write meta, title tags or rewrite URLs etc we are doing work completely different from what we used to do before. We are more concentrating of setting up one way links which is the most difficult part of SEO. Its not easy to get free one way links these days so we need to invent new innovative ideas to get one way back links. Though this is a difficult part we are able to find some really quality ways. Especially we were able to get a lot of success for our clients by widget optimization, social media optimization etc. I want to remind the author of the thread that SMO, link building has always been part of SEO. In fact SEO is the mother of all new innovative tactics that come online now. SEO will never die at least for another 10 years but it will keep evolving like the way we see the world. Its not the same world that we saw 10 years back and it’s the same case with SEO 10 years down the road you will see stuff which you never had seen before.