April 7th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

There was a page rank update last week, me, personally, I’ve lost all interest in that little green bar but I know there are a lot of people who still hang on that figure. To them “unranked” is a dirty word, a dirty horrible nasty word! I’ve had my fair share of unranked pages in the past and for the most part where I’ve chosen to I’ve managed to get them “some rank”, here’s my tips for getting back on Google’s good books.

First and foremost, you have to remember that Google only export the Page Rank figures once a month, quarter, year. Basically they do it whenever the hell they like. The Page Rank figure is ticking along in the background all the time, it’s just we only get snapshots. If your brand new content is showing as unranked then that is perfectly normal. Before panicking do a search on the web and see if there has been a Page Rank export recently. The webmaster forums will be alive with talk of it so it shouldn’t be hard to spot. If there has and your page still shows as unranked then you may have one of the following problems:-

1. No Inbound Links – A lot of landing pages in particular used to be created as orphan pages. No links in and perhaps only an affiliate link out. This isn’t the way that Google wants the web to work, so if you’re creating pages like this seriously consider adopting the new standard for landing pages and think about building it into a mini website. Even just 2-3 INTERNAL links can move an orphaned page from unranked to some rank.

2. A Lack Of Text – This is my biggest problem with unranked pages. The problem is exaggerated where you have a page within a text heavy menu system (this blog is a decent example). I have created many pages in the past that are set out in the form of a table, full of interesting data but when push comes to shove barely 100 words of content. These have always been a nightmare to budge from unranked. The easiest solution to this is to get your thinking cap on and add 150-250 words of written content somewhere on that page. Seriously if you’ve a sparse looking page that’s been through several page rank exports and is still unranked there is a 99% chance that it’s simply a lack of text (here’s a perfect example)

3. Your Outbound Links – The search engines know that we can’t control who links to us – punishing us for dodgy inbound links would be stupid. However, they also know that we do control who we link out to and in my experience this can be enough for Google to land your page with a Page Rank of unranked. There are 2 problems here, the number and quality. Too many links from a single page and you can get hit for it. Perhaps an even bigger problem though is putting too many affiliate links on a page. Who hasn’t in the past built up some great page rank/traffic and then nailed the page with affiliate links only to find your page rank either drops or goes back to unranked? It’s something I’ve been guilty of plenty of times! Besides the obvious cut back on your links advice I’ve also got a pretty cool tip that can help out with this. Link to Wikipedia. It’s just a case of balancing the quality of your outbound links and linking to Wiki can really help out with this.

In writing this I can see that my top menu items are suffering from some of these problems. I’m going to do a little bit of work on 2 pages in particular that are currently unranked (Adsense List, and my Money Makers) just to show that these methods do work. Come the next page rank update I’d expect to see a little bit of green on those pages.

THE BIG DISCLAIMER – Increasing your page rank in no way, shape or form guarantees a better ranking in the search results. Over the last 3 years Page Rank appears to have less and less of an influence in Google’s ranking algorithm. Put it this way, in the last 6 months I’ve seen a home page PR drop from 3 to 1 (despite a huge increase in high quality links) but at the same seen my organic search traffic increase a lot. Worrying too much about page rank is neither healthy or a wise use of your time – talking about page rank in the pub may get you slapped.

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Paul B