Pagerank 0

[Optimise]

My website is around 2 years old and despite the fact the my site has 45,000 urls indexed and ranks highly for some competitive terms on Google, my pagerank is 0.

I appreciate that pagerank is not the be all and it would never have really concerned me, however around 1 month after the site was launched, it went up to PR1 before dropping to 0 on the next pagerank update where it has remained since (1.5 years later).

I haven't done any blackhat seo, nor would I have lost any good links at the time it dropped.  The site is much more established and ranks well for quite a lot of terms so why is it still Pagerank 0?  Could there be some sort of issue do you think?

Thanks

[DarinPirkey]

Can you provide URL so we can take a closer look?

What pages are page rank 0? Are all of them?  If you have 45k urls then it sounds like your internal link structure may be weak.  If you can post your URL we can go through it and take a look.

[Optimise]

It's [URL Removed]

They are all 0, even the home page.   Thank you very much for the help.

[DarinPirkey]

I didn't do an entire site audit (obviously) but it looks like the links coming to your site are primarily directories.  Your domain authority is 24 and your page authority is 34 for the home page.  (I used SEOmoz's ToolBar for this)  Remember, PR is a link analysis.

I would start a real quality linkbuilding campaign.  Try to guest blog on some high ranking, high authority sites about any particular topic in the muscle building world.  You can link back to your site from there.  It takes time to earn that right but it is well worth it.

[DarinPirkey]

Here is Matt Cutts on PageRank

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Jup5R1MGY

[Adam.Whittles]

You are right that PR is not 'the be all'. You shouldn't worry too much about it and should really be focussing on other more important factors.

Pagerank (or PR) is really just a mathematical formula, which you can read more about here. In order to get a larger ranking, you essentially need links from pages with higher PR. For example, if you wanted to obtain a PR of 2 you would need 3 links from a PR3 page. You can find various charts around the web that highlight PR requirements.

Having looked at your site in opensiteexplorer.org, it is clear why your PR is not higher. Although you have over 1,500 links, these links are from only 12 different c-classes. This essentially means that you only realistically have 12 different links due to the way Google treats links from the same c-class. Also, as Darin has rightly pointed out, the majority of these links are pretty poor quality with not much PR themselves.

If you are adamant about improving your PR, you will need to obtain links from sites/pages with a higher PR. However, I wouldn't recommend adopting a strategy based on improving pagerank. You would be much better off improving the quality of your site with content that people find useful enough to link to.

[Optimise]

Thanks for the responses guys.  Although the site is clearly in need of links, Open Site Explorer only shows a very small proportion of the links we have.  Maybe 5% of what's in Webmaster tools.  From what I've read on here it seems most people seem to have 40%+ shown in OSE, however it's much much lower than that for us.

Perhaps a lot of our links are quite deep links that Open Site Explorer hasn't managed to find however they are relevant links from sites in our niche so what I would consider relevant and high quality.

Sounds like from what you're saying, more links are needed anyway so I'll be focusing on that.  That said, I still don't know why my page rank dropped from 0 as at the time it barely had any links at all and it has 10 times what it had then, very odd.

Also, the site has so much unique user generated content, I'm at a bit of a loss on how to make even more content that would be of use!  I'm always getting linkback notification emails so I know there are loads of links, OSE just doesn't show them.

[Adam.Whittles]

I'm sure you have many more links that OSE doesn't show. However, this is beside the point. Like I said previously, PR is a mathematical formula that depends on the PR of your linking pages. You may have many thousands of links but if they are all from pages with a PR of 0 or -1, then your PR will not improve. It's not just about the volume of links but the PR of those linking pages and the number of outbound links on those pages.

It is not unusual to see a drop in PR. Google has evolved over the years and the way it treats links has also evolved. It is likely that a number of the links you had when your site had a PR of 1 were treated differently by Google after an algo update and were therefore devalued.

Ultimately, you shouldn't be chasing PR and definitely you shouldn't be building links with the aim of increasing your PR. Focus instead on getting your site to rank well for the key terms that drive traffic to your site.

[Optimise]

Thank you Adam, much appreciated.

[Adam.Whittles]

No problem.