Be Excellent To Each Other

There's lots of sites online that tell you how to improve your Google Pagerank, but anyone here got any real world experience?

After something The Right Honorable Doctor Gaywood DFC mentioned last week I looked at my business site and it ranked a lowly 2 (using the scripts at the wonderful http://www.widexl.com/). This is obviously not good.

I know the mantra is to get sites with high page ranks to link to you but this is harder said than done.

I have started a company Facebook page and a blog to try and help, but any other tips? Seems Google is a tricky beast to crack and although adwords works splendidly for me, some people do tell me that they never click on the sponsored links.



I also nominate this thread as the best thread title of the week. Not as good as my Bill Oddie one though. I'm so awesome (shut up you dick - Ed).

SEO is a dark art. Jonarob is the man to ask, though.

What did I say to provoke this? 2 is quite low, yes, although I wonder about that tool. Fscked.co.uk, it claims, isn't ranked but I'm sure I used to get a reading of 3 or so from the Google toolbar.

Does anyone have the Google toolbar installed?

I imagine it was when you mention some practice that could get you kicked off the search engines?

I don't look at pagerank now really. My site used to be a 5, then a 4, but since the downtime/site switch I had over Christmas, I wouldn't be surprised if it's come down further.

Yeah, 1998 does.
I'd be impressed if that tool could be wrong - all it does is send the URL to Googles search API and display the result. Only so much you can get wrong, there.

I mentioned how the templates I used for my site came with a section at the bottom of the code that included some 1 pixel images that you could tag to get search engines to visit all the pages on your site and also improve your search terms.

The other tools on that site seem quite useful. But perhaps they are all borked?

I thought Google Toolbar was filled with spyware crap.

Yes. It's not good.

Indeed, which is why I'm asking and not installing it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that API is actually private and not supposed to be for public consumption. The only supported way I know of getting the pagerank is to use the Toolbar.

Oh yeah, so it seems. Odd, I'm sure I used it a year or so ago. Maybe it's been and gone again.

Hello!

First of all, the Facebook page and a blog is a start, but perhaps not a great one. Where've you hosted the blog? If you've hosted it on a separate blog site like Blogspot, you're already wasting your time. The idea of starting a blog is to post interesting content that people will want to link to, these links will increase the pagerank of your blog, not necessarily the pagerank of your main site. So, you want to link to your site from your blog as often as possible to pass on the pagerank. Ideally, you want the blog at yourdomain.com/blog, so Google is at least acknowledging the existence of yourdomain.com. If you've done that already, good stuff.

Getting people to link to your site is indeed difficult and there are a lot of ways you can go about doing it. I'd start by putting a link to your site everywhere you possibly can. In your forum signatures, in profile pages on social networking sites, dogging sites, whatever you use. I'd also comment on other blogs in your particular field with something interesting to add to the general discussion, with a link back to your own site. This is all good whitehat stuff and completely above board.

If you've got money to spend, you can pay people for links, but if Google spots it, they'll discount the links and you'll be back to square one. There are a zillion ways to make backlinks, you just have to get creative. As for the Facebook page, it might be good for a bit of brand awareness amongst the Facebook folk, but the likelihood of it improving your pagerank is very minimal because Facebook is a closed shop. Google can't spider it all because you need an account to see anything. The only Facebook pages Google indexes are the 'public profile' bits. Still, I wouldn't say 'stop wasting your time on Facebook', it's useful in a different way.

Try setting up a Twitter account and link to any blog posts from there. Set up a Digg account and Digg them. Set up accounts on the various Digg clones, and other things like Delicious.

Pagerank will come in time. It's based on various things such as the quality and variety of sites linking to you, the number of links and the age of the page.

HOWEVER, all of this is academic because pagerank really isn't very important. It was up until a few years ago, but recently low pagerank sites are ranking highly in the Google results regardless. And this is what you want. You want to be ranking highly for search terms in your field. So, go back to the start of this post and follow it all again, forgetting about pagerank. It's still applicable, but for search engine rankings rather than the pointless pagerank number. Also, it helps if the links you're posting to your site have a relevant anchor text. If you're selling cheap cars, you want the anchor text to say 'cheap cars', or variations on this. So, when someone searches Google for 'cheap cars', your page comes out on top, you get the traffic, you make the money.

Basically, pagerank is bollocks. There are a lot of sites out there that will tell you it's important. I can tell you from experience working in this field, that those people are either lying and deliberately misinforming, or way behind the rest of the field in SEO. There are a lot of so-called 'SEO' companies out there taking advantage of people who don't know much about it, and they're making a hell of a lot of money from it using old techniques, out of date information and very basic stuff (like inserting a keyword into some text a few times - on-page SEO - and not even building backlinks). These people are cunts.

edit: And fscked.co.uk is a pagerank 0. 0 is actually a pagerank, though, so it's not unlisted. N/A would mean it is unlisted.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask!

Thanks. All interesting stuff. The blog is indeed on Blogspot so perhaps I should see if my site can support Wordpress or something? My thinking was the act of the Blogspot blog linking to the main site would provide an initial and quick boost. Likewise I've been sprucing up my Youtube channel because it's easy to generate content for and clients like it as well.

I also have a couple of other domains that act as landing pages for adwords campaigns which link in. And the company shows up on all the usual directory things (if I asked or not!). But naturally as an established business I have to be careful what I associate myself with. Just sticking URL's on forums such as this are of no consequence. Professional forums perhaps and of course Linkedin which does appear to be indexed by Google.

As for keywords and all that jazz, I like to think I'm pretty hot on that as it helps the adwords work better. The WideXL scripts give me a good bill of health as well.

It's all going to need some thought.

There's a good video on how to use a blog here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-f ... -your-blog

Basically explaining what I tried to explain. You're doing right to link to your site from a blog, but other people are more likely to link to your blog rather than your site, so you're getting links from one place when you could be getting them from loads of places, if you get me? The video explains it well.

And definitely professional forums. Google categorizes websites, so if you're getting links from a certain category of sites, it's going to assume your site is of the same category, giving the links more relevancy and therefore more weight.

Also, I'm not sure what you're getting at with the Adwords jazz, but using Adwords doesn't make any difference to SEO whatsoever. Links from adwords ads don't count as backlinks, either. If you mean you're covering your main keyword bases (so to speak) with your Adwords campaigns, that's fair enough, but with a bit of targeted SEO, you could get yourself in the number one spot for those keywords on the organic listings, allowing you to turn the Adwords off and saving you lots of cash.

Also, that Widexl (I've never actually heard of it) is a Yank site, so its SEO tools aren't particularly handy if you're based in the UK. US search engine results can be completely different. You want to rank in the UK.

edit: Of course, it depends what you're selling! I don't know what your site is, but I would've assumed you want UK customers?

Also, if you want me to take a look at your site to see if you're doing anything wrong SEO-wise, just send me the URL in a PM and I'll give it a going over.

Valid, but I should point out that some forums (ie. this one) don't show signatures to search engines.
So just put your URL into every post, Malc-style*!

*please don't

Isn't that bad for BeEx's search engine rankings? I thought Google frowned upon you showing them different content to the users.

Only in a deceptive way. I very much doubt Google has a problem with the signature thing, especially if it's a feature coded into widely used forum software.

Right, downloaded Wordpress, followed the instructions and then couldn't work out why it didn't work.

Then I realised I needed to pay Fasthosts 25 quid for a database to host it on (duh) so now I have Wordpress up and running.

Now to disseminate essential information!