I experience the horrors of Google PageRank 0 and miss the point of my stress course…
Background: I’ve been launching and promoting a Web 2.0 Devon business directory.
I threw myself in at the deep end with this: it was my first completed Joomla / Web 2.0 site and had a budget of practically zero (I practised things on it for work!). It was also my first experience of doing my own sales and marketing, and worst of all, being local, it was all aimed at people around me… a kind of motivational experience which could best be descirbed as ‘bracing’. Those people on the Apprentice may look like idiots at times, but I have some sympathy!
I kept a diary at the time, and this is a kind of blog with hindsight, after all, there were so many ‘learning experiences’ involved…
This post covers the period when its Google PageRank went from ‘unranked’ to (drumroll…) zero. Yikes.
Click this link to view all posts about launching the directory
1/10 Stress course in Exeter, but I can’t put more cards in the arts centre because they haven’t arrived yet. But instead I get a definite listing at least – I went to a nice new independent coffee shop operating out of the side of Exeter High Street’s last independent shop, selling Fairtrade organic drinks and snacks.
Just the thing, I thought so I asked them if I could add a listing and took their details on a loyalty card. So I have one more entry at least.
The girl there was interested as her brother was an artist, but once he heard it was 15 pounds for a gallery he started grumbling about only selling them for 30 pounds. I don’t get paid enough for my work either, I thought, and went home to put on a special free offer on galleries and maps till the 15th November.
On the bright side, I seem to be making a few more pennies in AdSense clicks.
2/10 Advertising stuff arrives from . The T-shirts actually look quite nice, not bad for free plus postage. I’ve also got more business cards and some magnets now, but will have to wait a bit longer for more postcards.
Checked the site’s indexing in Google. Dismayed to discover it has gone from being unranked to a page rank of zero. Also dismayed to discover the site’s global meta description is being used for every page I have in Google’s index. Well I guess that’s what it meant by global. So I deleted that.
I can see a few more problems: pages being indexed as duplicates, the home page being duplicated as it is currently the directory home page as well, and the page titles within the directory are mostly taken up by the site title and the directory name.
Between the page titles and the site wide descriptions, that could be a reason why not many people are coming from google even though I’m appearing on the first page of results – after all if the pages don’t look relevant they won’t look at them.
3/10 Bad dreams. Lie awake imagining a website full of hopeless drawings.
I revert to the short urls version of search engine friendly urls for the directory to remove the duplicate pages in there. Wonder what to do about renaming the directory as I like the name it currently has (Stairway to Devon Web Directory). But if it’s too long, I should probably shorten it to Devon Directory.
At work, I try again to persuade my employer to add his listings – he seems about to and then says he has to think about what to say. Humph.
Site seems worryingly slow on there – I may have to remove the stats program (Joomlastats). Hope that doesn’t wipe out the visitors by country graph, which is the main thing I installed it for.
I’m considering hanging on to the stats program until I get 50 countries in my visitor statistics – at the moment it’s up to 42!
Very disappointing news from Smart Traffic, the website promotion company in Plymouth whose salesman keeps ringing me. Apparently my directory isn’t up to their standards because of its page rank being zero. It’s such a circular argument, because if they would get behind it and add their listings, the whole thing would have a better chance of taking off and improving its Page Rank. Gits. On the bright side, I guess they won’t be phoning me any more!
I wonder if I will have some good luck with this website soon.
Started reading an article explaining Google page rank, and suddenly realise I used to know the author, from mountaineering club at university. Glad to see he seems to be doing well. I recognise several of the site’s SEO problems there. One new thing it convinces me of is the need to improve the website’s internal linking.
I bite the bullet, change the directory name to ‘Devon Directory‘ and edit the email templates to say ‘Stairway to Devon Directory‘. I put the What’s New page on the home page, rearrange the pictures a bit, removed the polls that were appearing twice, remove the SEF URL alias and hope to goodness other people add some news soon.
Annoying discovery – when I move What’s new to the front page, the directory link still keeps going to the front page as well. Have changed everything I can think of to fix it – no luck yet. Swapped them back. So I still can’t get rid of the home page duplicate content issue or put my news page on the home page, unless I make all my urls in google or yahoo invalid. In the meantime, had visitor from Russia.
Nothing working properly. Fed up and tired.
Comments:
Looking back, I can see I completely missed the point of my stress course, trying to fit it in between direct sales and advertising! Hmm..
I threw myself in at the deep end with this website, but looking back from the comfort of a healthier PageRank of 2, I can see the zero pagerank was not such a big deal to get stressed over (though that could be because it didn’t last long!). It was more of an impetus to give the website an SEO (search engine optimisation) check up and fix some issues that clearly weren’t helping.
My zero Pagerank period also coincided with a Google update that gave many big name sites a massive Pagerank cut too, so there was some comfort in that.
However, all those who staunchly insist that Pagerank doesn’t matter should notice that, within the day, I had a rejection of my directory by a website promotion company.
Regarding the problems with menu items, modules and slowness, at the time I blamed Joomlastats for the slowness, but I now think OpenSEF is largely to blame for all those issues. Unfortunately, removing it at this stage would be a massive job, but I don’t think I would use it again. I’ve now got a massive list of visitors by country though, so I might disable Joomlastats soon in case it does help.
Links:
Here’s the URL for the Google Pagerank article: http://www.ianrogers.net/google-page-rank/
Courtney Tuttle: Google Slapping Entire Internet Marketing Industry
Andy Beard: Penalty confirmed – but I don’t sell Pagerank
Andy Beard – Digg favourites slapped by Google
Search Engine Land: Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google