Hi, I work for a major firm of Solicitors (a lawyer in England that deals with clients, rather than a Barrister - a litigator) I have been working on SEOing one of the websites that took a big hit in October last year due to being built by a firm that employed BlackHat SEO techniques. Since I have been working on the new project to get the website back on track, I have noticed a few serious gaps in my knowledge. Being a concientious worker bee, I have been reading fora and blogs to increase our knowledge of what will work and what won't. Sadly two things are evident: one is that we are not the first page on any of our 4 starting key phrases, this is to be expected because; two I am still not a god of SEO (which is a pity ). So - the question I need help with today: Can anyone explain these results? URL,Back Links,PR,Pages In URL www clearanswers co.uk,4490,7,95 wwwtheclaimlinecom,118,4,108 www thompsons law.co.uk,195,5,998 clearanswers is being SEO'd by the prior company, who are probably well within the greyhat community, while I/we am/are working on theclaimline. Ok - seriously - the question: With fewer than 100 pages of content, and 4490 links - most of which are not relevent - why the PR of 7 for clearanswers. Whereas most of the content on theclaimline is original, or quoted from the main thompsons site, there are more pages, the links are all (pretty much) relevent and the PR is a measly 4. What can I do? Another little question: why does link: clearanswers (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=link:+www.clearanswers.co.uk&btnG=Search) produce 4150 results? while link: theclaimline (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=link:+www.clearanswers.co.uk&btnG=Search) produces 1260 The results above show that theclaimline has way fewer than clearanswers Um - that it really! cheers S
Pagerank has nothing to do with a number of links, quality of content or such things. Pagerank is a score. The score is caculated by the links that you get but is more complicated than that. Two important things: 1. What is the PR of the page that links to you. (Page, so not home of the website, but the links.html) 2. How many extern links are on that page. (3. is Google allowed to follow the links) Interesting article about it: http://www.compar.com/infopool/articles/PR-calculation.html Want to know what kind of PR you get the next update? Calculate it: http://www.thinkbling.com/prcalc/index.php Hope this helps.
Fora! The link: operator does not give accurate results for google. They only seem to acknowledge a subset of your links. Relevancy has no bearing on pagerank/ Pagerank is purely a function of backlinks (and the pagerank of the linking page). What are the keyphrases you're targetting?
Cheers for the replies. The four keyphrases we're using to measure our 'success' are: Accident Claim Claim Advice Injury Claim Personal Injury Claim As you can see - the market place is filled with all manner of sites, ranging from old firms with years of history behind them to other, less reputable, firms. (of course, we're the former )