Google
Our new sites have been up and running now for about 8 weeks. They were submitted in normal fashion, and I have not done any sneaky Google tricks like Bombing, NoText-madness or whitespacing. In fact, most of the pages aren't really well optimised. We've previously had good results with Google, achieving top 10 results for some terms and top 1 for a few select ones, which is a big achievement in travel term (We think).
Anyway, on the last pass by the googlebot - we got a PR of...ZERO!! Nightmare I cried. Desperate to discover why, I checked the sites, checked for back links, used my toolbar to maximum effect but could still not decipher why we had a PR of Zero, which in effect kills your rankings.
<As_I_Understand_It> In very short form, the PR is a modifier to your google score. You could get so many points for content, keyword positioning etc etc. Say you got an arbitrary score of 500 for your page. Your PR is derived from the PR of those pages that link to this page. if your PR is say 4 (And the PR thing is really just a nominal number plucked out of the ether) then your ranking score is 2000. If your PR was 8, your ranking score would be 4000, etc. </As_I_Understand_It>
Google grabs all those links that have a certain ranking score at the end and then displays so many over a certain amount. The higher your PR, the better your chance of getting a good ranking with a poorly designed page. With a PR of 0, you have basically no chance of being up with the bad boys of SEO
Now, I'm expecting, nay, hoping, that someone will tell me different.Anyway, after much work , I found that the toolbar was being inconsistent. A page with a zero page rank was indeed still showing up in the top 10 for its term. So it *couldn't* have had a PR of 0. No way, uh uh...
A mooch on the search engine forums reveals that what is happening is that the google toolbar is being worked on, hence its exclusion from content heavy Google main page.It even led to the Aprils fools joke about PigeonRank
For completeness, the sites are:
Travel Home Working
Travel Counsellors
Recruitment Counsellors