My google pagerank - Google PageRank carefully explained and what you can do with it - written by top SEO experts

I'm puzzled by my site's ranking.

1. How Google ranks pages.
Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our Technology Overview page for more details. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, we limit the information we make available to the public about our ranking system.

2. My page's location in the search results keeps changing.
Each time we update our database of webpages, our index invariably shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and sites' ranking may change. Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. No one at Google hand adjusts the results to boost the ranking of a site. The order of Google's search results is automatically determined by many factors, including our PageRank algorithm, and is described in more detail here.
You might check to see if the number of other sites that link to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining which sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web, jumping from page to page via hyperlinks. To find a sampling of sites that link to yours, try a Google link search.

3. My pages don't return for certain keywords.
Google does not manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manually "boost" the rankings of any site. The ranking process is completely automated and takes into account more than 100 factors to determine the relevance of each result.
If you'd like your site to return for particular keywords, include these words on your pages. Our crawler analyzes the content of webpages in our index to determine the search queries for which they're most relevant. If your site clearly and accurately describes your topic and many other websites link to yours, it'll likely return as a search result for your desired keywords.
If you feel that certain keywords are essential to your site's success, you may want to consider our targeted keyword advertising program. Google does not sell placement in our results, but we do offer advertising adjacent to them. Please note that advertising with Google neither helps nor hurts your site's ranking in our search results.

As a case study, on April 2007 google updates, I having about 10 websites. And got 2 of them are sitting in the same server and linked to each other. In general all my websites are increased in pagerank, except the two that are sitting in the same server.

The major issue that I identified is one of the two website, the homepage/index page is having pagerank lower than the inner page. I did a backlink checked and all backlinks are going to main page, not the inner page. Question is why the inner page got better pagerank instead?

We know that pagerank from page A flow to Page B when they are linked together. And the inner page pagerank must be come from index page, as there is no external source that link to inner page.

Finally I found out from online webmaster forums, that there are few discussion about this as well. And its concluded that the same IP address is the main caused for this. Some view it as google sandbox. But its not totally correct. Google sandbox is where your website is totally drop from google SERP.

Many people believe that getting listed in a major search engine like Yahoo!, Google, or MSN is almost as good as getting your business mentioned on the Oprah show. Not quite. You see, getting listed in a search engine, even a major search engine, won't accomplish much unless you get placed in the top few listings on a number of specific keywords that you target.

In this next series of articles entitled 'How to get prospects to find you using the Internet', I'll teach you everything you need for economical search engine optimization, getting found in your town (local search engine positioning), and offer a bunch of tips for the Google search engine, Yahoo search, and other small business web site search engine positioning.

In this article I will teach you 4 keys to creating a search engine friendly site. Let's get started.

Rule #1: Give visitors the information they're looking for

The single most important thing is to provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. Pages with useful content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.

Rule #2: Make sure that other sites link to yours

Links help crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in search results. When returning results for a search, search engines combine PageRank (their view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Search engines count the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Don't fall for page linking scams. Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site. All the major search engines have algorithms that can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links, such as doorway pages, to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines.

Rule #3: Make your site easily accessible

Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. Static links are URL's that do not contain special characters, such as www.AskBigPapa.com . URLs that contain "?" are called dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are created by server-side scripting languages, such as php, asp, jsp, perl, and cgi. The portion of the URL appearing after "?" is the page's query string parameter and is the part of the URL that changes.

Even if your web site depends on dynamic links you may be able to create static copies of dynamic pages. If you create static copies, don't forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent search engines from treating them as duplicates.

Rule #4: Things to Avoid

Don't try and fool search engines by filling your page with lists of keywords, attempting to "cloak" pages, or putting up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don't intend visitors to see, the major search engines consider those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.

Avoid search engine optimization companies that claim to "guarantee" high ranking for your site in search results. Honest search engine optimization firms can improve your site's flow and content, but beware of others who may employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could end up banned.

The best advice I can give you is to keep your web site simple. Many web sites are loaded with images. Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Crawlers do not recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.

Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. To ensure that your preferred page is included in search results, you'll need to block duplicates from search engine spiders using a robots.txt file. I've posted an article in the Google section of my site, www.AskBigPapa.com, that will teach you how to block various Google user agents.

If you're looking for more information on search engine optimization, click here now!

Have a small business, sales, or marketing question for Rodney, 'AskBigPapa', Goldston? Submitt your questions at www.AskBigPapa.com. If your question is selected the answer will be published and you will win a free 30 minute telephone consultation courtesy of Rodney Goldston .


For those website owners who are new to the world of search engine optimization, I have something important to tell you. It is critical that you not only get lots of quality, one-way relevant links to your website, but that you carefully choose the text in those links. The text that is used in the hyperlinks on articles, blogs, forums and other pages is known as "anchor text".

This anchor text is used by Google and most other search engines in determining the relevance of your site content for any particular search term. You can spend hours a day getting backlinks from article directories, forums, blog posts and web directories. This should help your Google PageRank, but it will not bring you targeted search traffic unless you use anchor text that is relevant to your site content and to searches done by your target audience.

As a directory owner myself, I see it all the time. The most commonly used anchor text chosen by article authors is "click here". While this is useful for human visitors who can click the active hyperlink to enter your site, it does nothing to improve your page ranking in the search results. Instead of using this bland, generic anchor text, you can use a phrase that best describes your product or service. The phrase should also be something that a Google user is likely to enter in a search for your product/service.

Let's say you want to promote your home improvement blog, so you submit articles to free article directories. In the Author's Resource Box, you include a catchy promotional phrase along with three active links to your site. In one of these links you could use the anchor text "home improvement blog" to point to your home page. You could use the second and third links to promote important pages in your site like product sales pages. So you could use the anchor text "discount deck fasteners" and "bathroom vanities" to link to your product pages.

If you consistently use these three anchor text phrases, you will improve your ranking in the search engine results pages for these phrases. As you can imagine, there is a lot of competition out there for many hot phrases. Try to choose a phrase that fits the content of your site and that isn't too general (like "blog") or too specific (like "learn how to install your own swimming pool").

So now the question is, "What anchor text should I use for my site?" Google Webmaster Central has added excellent new statistics tools that let you see in detail what searches are performed, what keywords are used, your average position in searches, and much more. All of this is free once you sign up.

You can, and should, also use your own server statistics to see what searches people are using to get to your site. There are also third-party services such as WordTracker that estimate total daily searches for particular keywords and phrases. Once you have chosen your anchor text, it is important to monitor your position in the search rankings and also your site traffic to see what the changes are.

Now you know what anchor text is, and why it is vital in any website promotional campaign. By simply changing the text you use in your backlinks, you can have a considerable impact on your website traffic from search engines. By monitoring your rankings in the search engine results, you can fine-tune your anchor text and watch your site soar to the top of the rankings.