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It looks as if the latest page rank update is complete. Despite Matt Cutts’ recent declaration that some earlier penalties will be revoked, several of my websites are still languishing at Page Rank 0 due to their previous association with the infamous PayPer Ppost embedded code. All links with that company were severed over six months ago but these quality blogs have still not recovered.
I have another domain that gets the highest traffic counts of all my sites and that has Page Rank 1, but that has stayed the same in the latest page rank review. I was disappointed because I post quality articles on that blog at least three times a week and I have worked hard on optimizing it. Maybe nex time …. The good news for me was that a new travel blog that I launched on 13 June has achieved Page Rank 1, not bad for a site that is only six weeks old. I got this site indexed by Google in four days and I have posted detailed posts at the rate of more than two per week ever since.
Why do I care so much about Page Rank? Because I believe that higher ranked sites will always do better in organic search results. Higher PR = higher SERPS ranking.

I wrote at the end of October about the latest Google Page Rank Update and its effects on many well known websites. Google declared its opposition to sites that sell paid links several months ago - yes, paid links are the mainstay of Google’s business but they do not like other people to make money from paid links. When the page rank update took effect the loss of page rank was damaging to a number of high profile respected websites. For my own businesses I noticed that several of my websites and blogs gained their first page rank or had an increased page rank update. Google states clearly that page rank is decided by a complex algorithm that balances the quality of the website content with its popularity. Popularity is measured by a mix of inbound links, readership and numerous other SEO factors. So how did the Google algorithm measure the page rank of a Dog Health Tips site as PR 4 one day in October, and Page Rank 0 a few days later? Google deny that they were targeting sites that were selling text links, but there is no other explanation for these page rank reductions.

The number of links to your site will affect your page rank and search engine rankings. But, in the words of Google, “avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links”. How can you be certain that you have not allowed any bad links from your site? It is now much easier to find out with an excellent free link checking tool called the Bad Neighborhood checker.

Thousands of links from overcrowded directory pages in niches unrelated to your site will not benefit your page rank - of course I was aware of that and I am quite careful about the places where I seek backlinks now. The Bad Neighborhood tool will quickly scan the outbound links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and alert you to possible problem areas.

I used this on my own site and there were a few questionable links lurking in my outbound links, which I would not have discovered without using the tool.

You get a lot of useful information from the link checker: link density is highlighted using the red, green amber traffic light system. Green means the site meets Google’s Webmaster guidelines of 100 links or less. Then there is a tick to indicate that the page checks ‘clean’ - i.e. there are no links to adult or other questionable sites. If a link is not ticked then it can show as a ‘redirect’ - not always suspicious as the tinyurls will flag in this way. But you might want to check other redirect links that show up. If the link page no loner exists the ‘404 not found’ cross will show, and finally if the link includes links where the anchor text contains bad language you will see the ‘Bad Neighborhood’ alert.

My suspicious links had arrived on my site because I hosted a few ‘Blog Carnival’ editions. The blog owners who submitted stories to me had some very questionable outbound links from their own sites, to adult and gambling sites. These were ‘nofollow’ links but they would still penalise me so I have now removed the links and I am not hosting any more blogging carnivals.

Another site that had sent me some bad outbound links was wholinkstome.com. Because any website owner can enter their URL on the site and the latest additions are listed together, my URL was next to all sorts of gambling and adult pages.

All this showed me that care is needed when choosing where to exchange links for your website or blog, and the online link exchange sites are out as most member sites are simply spam sites that could get your own site banned if you link to them.

If you check the backlinks to your new website or blog and the first result on Google states that there are 100+ results, then when you click the next page of results the figure comes down to 35, you will also see the phrase: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 35 already displayed.If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

This means that 65 of your pages have been dropped into the supplemental index. If you care about getting to the top of the search engine rankings then you will not want any of your web pages to show up in the supplemental index. Why do pages appear in the supplemental results and which ones are they? According to Google it is because the pages have a low page rank: well that is not correct because high PR sites have also gone into the supplemental section on occasion. The real cause for the drop is that the pages shown contain duplicate content, which is known as ‘Google Hell’ for webmasters or bloggers who take search engine optimization seriously. The supplemental results are those which are indented away from the left of the page when you view the list on a Google search. It is not a disaster to find some of your pages are showing as supplemental but if the figure is more than half the total (as shown in the example), and those pages are important ones, then that site is going to have problems and you need to fix them. If on the other hand they are short blog posts or results from minor directory listings then it is probably not worth spending the time trying to correct them. You would be better advised to research some new topics for your website or blog and write some fresh original content instead.