3D Visualisation, Animation, Motion Graphics and Web Design in Leeds
(info) Freelance Graphic Design
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I’ve had the google toolbar installed for a while now. It’s a very useful add-on to FireFox for me as I use google Notebook and Bookmarks and the toolbar provides nice easy access to both, so it’s a winner.
As a little bonus for me it has the ability to show the PageRank of whatever page you’re looking at. PageRank is the importance google assigns to a web page (0/10 been the lowest PR, 10/10 being the highest) based on how many other
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sites link to or reference that page. It gets a lot more complex than that and you can read about it and look at a horrible-and-not-very-helpful diagram here.
Anyway, I noticed the PageRank of the home page of this site, tmrw.co.uk, has gone up from 2/10 to 3/10. I know, not that significant at all, but it shows that I’m doing something right with all the little SEO bits and pieces I’m trying. As far as I can tell the better your PageRank the better your chances are of turning up on the front page of the google search results.
I put it down mainly to the fact that I’ve started leaving comments on other peoples blog posts.
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In the past I just read something then skipped onto something else, but now if I read something useful or interesting or download something off someones site, I usually leave a comment which in turn leaves a little hyperlink back to my site.
It looks like this site needs all the PR it can get at the moment too. I don’t know what I did or exactly when it happened, but despite my little PageRank boost Google doesn’t seem to like me any more.
It used to be that you searched for Freelance Design Leeds or Freelance Web Design Leeds and I came up on the first page for each one – not at the top by any means but I did OK.
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Now (Jan 2009) I’m currently back on page 10! Not good for generating new business, and the one thing a freelancer like me really needs to do is generate new business.
Ah well. I put this HUGE drop down the results table down to the fact I’ve been re-jigging the content and categorisation of this site/blog, and it’s confused google into thinking I’ve got a lot of duplicate content or something like that. I guess it’s just a case of waiting again and hoping I creep back up, page by page until I’m back up near the top again.
It’s not all bad though, have a search for freelance 3d design Leeds and I come second
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which is great. But to be honest, I don’t even know if that’s a term people search for a lot anyway.
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Hi Richard,
Your rankings certainly haven’t fallen because your PR has increased. But you shouldn’t take too much notice of the pagerank in the Google toolbar, it’s very approximate and only updated now and again. Your real pagerank, which Google uses to help rank the site, is a much more complicated logrithmic score that is updated frequently, but never made public. An upward trend in the toolbar figure is a positive indicator, but it’s far from definitive.
Content is much more important, and it is more likely the content changes that have made the difference. There’s a lot you could change for the better and you might want to have an SEO specialist give your site a once-over. There’s lots Google may have taken a dislike to, including the sheer size of the home page.
If you want to know who searches for what the quickest place to get an insight is here
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
That will tell you search numbers on the Google network for the previous month.
I also recommend you register with Google Webmaster Central and check to see if you have any penalties before proceeding with further optimisation.
Sorry to see you’re booked up, we could have done with you this month, but keep up the good work. Hope all goes well with the baby.
Hi Barry. I wasn’t really suggesting that the PR increase had caused the search rankings to fall, just pointing it out as a bit of an oxymoron :) Interesting to know that the toolbar’s value for a pages PageRank is only very approximate though – I always just assumed with it been an official goggle plug-in that it was the de-facto PR.
Cheers for pointing me in the direction of the adwords keyword tool too. I’ve used it in the past but it looks like it’s had a major overhaul since I last used it.
I’m also already registered with Google Webmaster Central too, but thanks for the hint anyway. There’s no red flags in there so I do genuine think it’s just the content/category re-jig that’s thrown my rankings down the pile for now.