Hi, all, I'm no expert at this by any stretch, but I have been using the coop for a few months with no problem. Here's my problem. I have a site for which I pointed my settings to a directory, specifically http://www.mdmsports.com/posters and all was well until today, my weight was validated to around 8000. Today I received an email that the site wouldn't validate, I think it found a page that was in Google's index that is no longer pointed to, not sure if it was found or not. So I went to revalidate, and did so OK. My weight went down to 1232 (from around 8000). My home page has a PR4 and 12900 pages indexed, my posters directory has a PR3 and I think around 5500 pages indexed. So without trying to figure out why the weight went way down, I figured I'd once again try to figure out why I couldn't setup the entire site. I had tried before, but was using Duncan Carver's LMA, and couldn't get the DP code to work. I went through threads here, and found others were successful, so I checked my records, and found I needed an update to the LMA, which I downloaded, put the code in, and it worked. So great, so far so good. Then I went to setup my site again, this time I pointed to the home page, www.mdmsports.com, with the PR4, and validated. It assigned a weight of only 650! Just to be sure I wasn't seeing things, I changed it to www.mdmsports.com/posters again, and got 1232. Back to the home page, and back to 650. My obvious question is why do I get half the weight pointing to the entire site as I do to only a part of it, when the home page has higher PR? Not to mention why did it go down from 8000 to 1232 to begin with? No decrease in number of pages indexed in the last week or month, no decrease in toolbar PR at least. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. Dennis.
How do I check it with the API tool? I tried to find someplace on the 'net that showed how to do that, but had no luck. --Dennis.
This has happened to me a couple times. Just now actually I manually recalculated my weight and it gave me a 4. I just hit recalculated 3 more times till it went back to what it should be... That usually does the trick for me.
The API can be screwy, but is currently the best way to check; as a better alternative becomes available I'm sure Shawn will evaluate it.
Thanks for all the responses, I'm always blown away by the helpfulness of the people in this forum (I've been lurking for months). Thanks to the above posts, I found my way to the backlink tracker, I never used it because I didn't know it also shows the indexed pages. So here's my dilemma, with more information: I have my main site, www.mdmsports.com, which is basically broken down into 2 sections, www.mdmsports.com/posters/ and www.mdmsports.com/directory/directory/ Stats: www.mdmsports.com, pages in Google using site: 12,900, pages in Google using backlink tracker: 7720, PageRank: 4, validated weight comes out to 650. www.mdmsports.com/posters/, pages in Google using site: 28, pages in Google using backlink tracker: 4120, PageRank: 3, validated weight comes out to 1232. www.mdmsports.com/directory/directory, pages in Google using site: 47, pages in Google using backlink tracker: 275, PageRank: 3, validated weight comes out to 683. Again, originally I just had the posters directory setup for the coop because I couldn't get the LMA directory to load the coop code properly to show links. Earlier this week, I had a weight of over 8000 for just the posters directory, but automatic validation failed because of an old page in Google's index, when I did a revalidate, it accepted it, but the weight came way down (to 1232). So I spent the afternoon figuring how to get the coop code onto the directory folder, and figured I'd validate the entire site instead of just the posters part. It validated and assigned me a weight of only 650, about half of what it gave for the posters. The home page has a higher PR than the posters directory main page, of course. Then as an experiment I tried just validating the directory folder, and it gave me a weight of 683, again more than the full site! So my questions are twofold: 1. Why is the full site, with more pages and more page rank, lower than either folder in the site? 2. Why did my weight come so far down to begin with, from 8000+ to 1232? Coincidentally or not, I loaded up the XML for a Google sitemap that same day, so perhaps that caused some fluctuation in the index (but hasn't shown so in the site:www.mdmsports.com search, it has been 12,900 for weeks). I put 5 coop links per page in all cases, by the way. I would think a PR4 site with 7720 pages indexed (going by the backlink tracker, which uses the API I assume), and 5 links per page, should get more than 650 weight, from what I've read on here over the last couple months. I don't see why it would get half the weight of the posters directory which has about half the pages and lower PR, that should be a fair assumption, right? Help!!!!!!!!!! ... and thanks! --Dennis.
I have a similar problem re weight drop and think it is because the number of pages have dropped, I think the backlink tracker continues to show the number of pages are the same but that number won't change until the links change. In the meantime in the background the number of pages have dropped hence the weight drop. I think thats what Shawn means here >>>It's only updated when the number of back links change (it's a back link tracker, not a pages in URL tracker, so pages in URL and PageRank are secondary to back links).<<< It makes sense - to me anyway
But again, what doesn't make sense to me is why the weight calculated for the full domain is less than EITHER (not just the combination) of the 2 main folders in the domain, when PR is higher for the home page than it is for the secondary pages. I know Shawn said he wouldn't reply to questions in this part of the forum, but does anyone else have a clue what the algorithm of the coop is, such that this kind of scenario could occur? At first I figured I'd change my setup back to point to the poster directory, which had higher weight than the full site, but then I read over the FAQ's again and it said to try validating again in 72 hours, so I pointed now back to the full site, and hope the problem will resolve itself. I don't have a lot of hope, I've revalidated at least a dozen times and not a single point change, but what the heck. If anyone has any helpful hints, I'd sure appreciate it. Thanks. Dennis.