Why is Your Google PageRank Dropping?

by Tom Sommers

All website owners and webmasters want a high pagerank (PR) for their site. A higher PR means a higher rank in the search engines and higher traffic volume. That’s a no-brainer. The problem is that some things you do to try to increase your PR can get you into trouble. Some can end up only lowering your PR and some can actually get you banned from Google entirely.

Let’s start with the biggest issue. One way to get into trouble with Google, or any search engine for that matter, is to have too many outgoing links on a page. Why? Because the search engines are programmed to believe that pages with excessive amounts of outbound links are “link farms” and will either penalize, ignore, or ban your site as a result.

You know you need to add good content to your site. But once you add a new article, if you don’t link it properly, your pagerank will not benefit. Google won’t index a page that is not linked to the rest of your site. So be sure to link your new content to an important page so the Google robots will find it and index it.

There are certain types of pages that you should not add to your site. Google will penalize you if you have a lot of identical or very similar pages on your site. A rule to keep in mind is to ask yourself whether your page adds any useful information to your website visitor.

As you work on getting backlinks to your site, don’t worry too much about getting that link from that huge popular site. You can often benefit more by getting lots of links from smaller sites that have lower pagerank. And these links are easier to get, so you can get more links to your site, which can help you more than that one link from that one popular monster site.

Often the best way to ruin your pagerank is to think about it too much. If all you focus on is pagerank and getting links, you will be susceptible to some of the questionable schemes out there that will get you penalized. Why not try concentrating on making your site something that visitors will be glad they found, because you added useful information. Continue to grow your site with good content and you will find it easier to get other sites linking to yours. And your pagerank will grow naturally.

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