Hi - I am very, very, very confused. Bit of background..... 4 years ago I entered the owrld of the internet and built myself a very basic site, called www.silverniknaks.co.uk. I knew very little about link building etc, so just created the site and it kind of grew very very slowly of its own accord. I then built similar sites called goldniknaks, diamondniknaks etc. etc, all selling jewellery. Eventually it got a bit silly with 7 sites all going on, all looking a bit stale and impossible to keep tabs on, so I grouped all products under one roof at www.niknakgroup.com. I then killed off the other domains and did redirects to the new site - just standard 301 redirects, nothing fancy. Anyway, I have been trying frantically to build the PR and SERPS of niknakgroup, and have finally started getting somewhere with huge sales growth this year, to the point I now employ people to help me keep up. I keep looking at my site and thinking it is professional etc. etc, but possibly alienates a lot of customers by looking too "official", so decided to resurrect silverniknaks. Bear in mind this domain has been empty for nearly 2 years. I have built my new site at silverniknaks, and just noticed that the domain has a PR of 5 - I have tried investigating further and Google is showing about 200 backlinks, all from forums in Germany that have no links to the domain at all (???). My main site niknakgroup meanwhile has 450 backlinks (actually about 3000, but 450 according to Google) and only has a PR of 3. I was under the impression that when a domain became empty, it lost PR pretty quickly. I also thought that a 301 redirect meant Google ignored the domain, and am pretty sure the links are negated because of it. Whilst I am very happy to find I have a PR5 site for no cost, anybody got a clue as to what is going on? I fo one am a very confused little bunny.....
on my machine your old domain name, www.silverniknaks.co.uk, shows page rank of three and the following message. This domain has just been registered for one of our customers. If you are selling bling think you should picture something that would knock my eyed out on homepage. This is for customer appeal, not SEO. Shannon
curious....as far as everything I know goes (not a lot admittedly), this site should now be a completely zero rated domain name, especially as it was used as a mirror for the last two months of its prior existence, showing identical content to the main site (until I figured that this could damage the rankings of both sites...) Anyway, just an observation, even a PR of 3 is a really good bonus for a revived site. Off to re-establish some link popularity....oh, and the engines must have been checking the domain fairly regularly as the big 4 found me straight away too - 3 days after I put some content onto the domain, Google already has 40 pages cached., and MSN, Yahoo and Ask are all returning results too....
OK, now the latest Google PR update appears to have hit. I have registered www.silverniknaks.co.uk on about 50 good class link directories, and was expecting (as suggested above) about a 3 or 4 - I got a 2. However, another site I am working on www.logon.info, which is not (as far as I am aware) listed anywhere at all, now has a PR of 3. Go figure. Not that it appears to make a jot of difference anymore anyway - my keyword metrics have stayed pretty much constant on my main site www.niknakgroup.com despite being one of only 3 sites in the top 20 for my main keyword whose PR has risen. Anyway, just thought I would post the observations.....
ok, disregard that last post - looks like either my google toolbar was having a mad moment or google rolled back the pr update and reverted to old rankings - seen a couple of othe rposts around with people getting happy/excited/worried then confused the next day, so maybe it isnt just me....
and the new pr is back again. oh well, really confused. I cant find silverniknaks anywhere on any search term worth noting, but it is already getting nearly as many visitors as my main site which ranks really well in the big G for literally thousands of keywords. Not too sure where the traffic is coming from and dont have the time to analyse my stats in great detail, but the extra orders is a real nice boost! Especially in July when you dont expect to sell a heap of jewellery!