Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Google Page Rank Heaven. PR=0 to PR=5 in 1 week.

I started a website awhile ago to sell some software products, and now I'm consumed with traffic stats, SEO, and Google Page Rank.

With some effort, I've managed to get my site listed in the Google front page for the terms that covet. Yet, for some reason, I could not get my Page Rank (or PR) to budge from zero. Zip. Nada. Zilch. You get the idea.

It just wouldn't move. No matter how much I improved the site, no matter how much I updated it. Fearing that some of the sites I was linking to were in a "bad neighborhood," I even went through all of the links in the site and used the new rel="no follow" tag. Apparently that's supposed to tell the Googlebot not to follow the link and therefore, not to penalize me for where it leads to.

Still, PR was zero.
"Screw it," I said. I was tired of worrying about PR. Google can stuff themselves.

Last week I went through my website and was updating the product blog, when I noticed something that I had not noticed before: there were thousands of comments to my blog entries. Literally, thousands.

I decided to clean up the comment spam, but there was so much of it, and the tools in b2Evolution were so poor (or at least my knowledge of it was so poor) that I just decided to nuke the entire blog and start over.

I manually copied a few of my favorite entries, reconfigured the blogging software to never allow comments, and pasted in my entries.

Then I went to out Google and summoned a bot to my site.

Now in less than a week, after nearly a year of being online, my PR has jumped from zero to five.

I know... That and a dollar will buy me a sticky French Vanilla capucino at my local gas station. But I just thought you'd like to know, in case you might be having the same problem.

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