Is the recent PR Slap a Wakeup Call?

One of my newest sites, http://carfixdaily.com (don't ya just love blatant self promotion Grin

) had not even been extant for 2 months and it got a PR3 in its first update.

Things I did for it was to link to it from other sites of mine, get it submitted to some directories (mostly ranked, but a few new ones as well), and I got it on a few topsites with quite a few of those being relevant to car sites.

A few things I have noticed with regard to Google PR:

On another forum where I occasion, there seems to be a belief in oversaturation of backlinks. I have questioned about that before and am of the opinion that whether you have 10000 or 100 backlinks, if you have good backlinks it is not going to make a difference how many 0 value backlinks you have. A contrary opinion I have heard from other webmasters is that they feel that backlinks which have no page strength (and frankly, few directory listings that are not on the front page are going to have any rank) will dilute the overall value of backlinks and weaken one's PR. With Google, though, with the way they constantly change their rules (yet, they will not update their guidelines to reflect that) there is no telling if Google does or will count 0 value backlinks against you.

With my car site, I was more selective with my backlinks. I used a submitter for some smaller search engines and directories, but hand submitted the majority of backlinks. The wholesale site I built for a friend has more backlinks to it than any other site I have built, yet I can't get it above a PR2.

Does Google distinguish between business and personal sites and apply different ranking criteria to them?

What about link maintenance?

There was someone who posted a question on this forum a while back concerning backlinks and a fear that had been instilled in him, by other webmasters, that getting too many backlinks would hurt him. I searched out the forum where he had gotten the advice and was basically stunned by how much worse the advice he had received became.

The basic tenet of the advice he received from several supposedly experienced webmasters was 'don't submit links, they will come to you'. Shocked

Uh...yeah, this is the webmaster equivalent of putting a tooth in a purse under your pillow and looking for silver in the morning.

Now, I don't have a bunch of tooth fairies out there bringing backlinks to me. My option is to keep submitting my link well after my site is ranked. The internet grows at an accelerated pace. I might have 100 good backlinks to my site, with several other backlinks thrown in for good measure, but that is today. If the internet grows tenfold, but my backlinks don't keep up, does my now smaller portion of backlinks affect me, even though they may be well ranked?

What is pagerank?

The general feeling is that if two sites are both equally relative to keywords, but one is ranked higher than the other, then the higher ranked site will be returned earlier in search results for that keyword.

Really? Roll Eyes

One webmaster, on another forum, tried to take me to task over a site of mine. http://aeratee.com is nothing more than a simple web portal that had been sitting as a sub-domain for quite a while. Being that I had been converting some of my sites to their own domains, I decided to get the domain for this one as well.

Since I had the site, and had the old sub-domain redirected, as well converted a few backlinks, I put a link to my car site on the portal, as I had done with several other sites of mine.

Interestingly, when I do a search for the link, the first site to be listed is the aeratee portal, over ranked sites which have been domains much longer.

I was told by another webmaster that I must have been mistaken and that the site must be ranked. I think I would know if a domain of mine, that was less than two weeks old at the time and had few backlinks, was ranked or not. I had done pagerank checks on the site and it is not ranked; then or now.

How is it that a non-ranked site, with a relatively new domain, gets higher listing status over ranked and older sites for the same keyword? Does alphabetation affect search returns?

My http://carfixdaily.com site (there I go again Cool

) is somewhat of a pet project. It is a simple, dinky little site with not much there; I just primarly put it up as I had pretty much designed the site as the fue7 site before I decided to use my own template. Since I had the site, I figured I might as well use it.

I have been a little more selective with submitting links for it as I want to see what kind of result I can get from these backlinks. So far, a site that had been up for barely 6 weeks, and spent half that time being down due to crappy hosting, did not do too bad to garner a PR3 on its first ranking. I am not as active with it now, but I do a submission or two about each week.

I had one webmaster snub my little car site. He wanted to trade links with relevant sites, so I put his link on my site, but he won't reciprocate with mine. I guess he never bothered to check the pagerank; he has links to other car sites, especially blogs, with which he has traded links, but most of them are not ranked as high as mine, if they are ranked at all. Is this a lesson in judging a book by its cover? Roll Eyes

I know a fellow photographer who has had a website since 1998. In all that time, he had a PR3 previous to the update; he now has a PR2. Kind of kills that theory about magical tooth fairies bringing backlinks to you, huh?

He had his site redesigned last year, which was when I discovered his poor pagerank. The new web designer did a beautiful job, for anybody who does not have flash disabled and a cable connection. The problem is that the homepage is nothing more that a page to call the flash file, with no meta tags. I have been trying to get together with him (schedules) to update his site for him and set up an email address on his domain so I can use it to promote his site.

I am cutting this short as all of this effing spyware that has me clicking all kinds of warning boxes has inadvertantly caused me to post this message even before I was through writing it. Some days I hate the internet and every dang thing it stands for; this is one of those days.