Hi Clare ~
To answer your questions:
"Question - is this because of the recent changes to how Google rates
sites or is it due to changes in my backlinks?"
The simple truth is that it could be either, or both.
Google's PageRank explains its page rank technology in its "PageRank
Explained":
" PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by
using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's
value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a
vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer
volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page
that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves
"important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages
"important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google
remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages
mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google
combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find
pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes
far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines
all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages
linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
Integrity"
- ://www.google.com/technology/index.html
And explains about why your PageRank may drop:
"Changes from one index to the next.
Each time we update our database of web page (about once a month),
our index shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and site
rankings change. If your site was dropped from Google and you have not
made major changes to it in the last month, we will likely pick it up
again in our next index. It's possible your site was simply
inaccessible when our robots tried to crawl it.
You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking
to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in
determining what sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages
when our robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via
hyperlinks. To find out who links to your site, use Google's link:
tool.
It's also possible your rank decreased because other sites were
found and assigned a higher rank. You can be assured that no one at
Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site.
Google's order of results is automatically determined by several
factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our "Why
Use Google" page for more information on how this works."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#B1
You can also check out "Why does my page's rank keep changing?" in
Google's Page Rank Information.
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html
===============
"Question 2
I have a new site ready to launch www.discoutdomainsuk.com which has a
rank of 3/10 would I be better to leave it on its existing url or
migrate it to the .ltd.uk url? the .ltd.uk URL is listed on both Dmoz
and Yahoo."
Google addresses that question in its Page Rank Information, "I'm
changing my URL. How can I maintain my rank?", which can be found
here:
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html
================
"I can see that some of the links appear to be link farms - but don't
know how bad an influence they are having on the page rank?"
Google addresses this in its "Quality Guidelines - Basic Principles":
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's
ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or
"bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected
adversely by those links."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
and then, says " Your page was manually removed from our index,
because it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to
assign accurate PageRank ... However, certain actions such as ...
setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines
may result in permanent removal from our index." (Google's "Other
Reasons")
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#B1
To assume that even a "few link farms" which haven't been found yet
are okay is living dangerously if you want to remain listed in Google.
They have removed sites for the linking schemes.
I trust this addresses your questions about your Google Pagerank. If
you have specific questions about any of the above relative to your
own site, you may want to submit a new question after you have taken a
look at Google's Pricing Guidelines:
- https://answers.google.com/answers/pricing.html
"$2-$5 ... can be answered with a single link or a single piece of
nformation. Sometimes, if a researcher is personally interested in the
question's subject, they may provide a longer answer."
Answer Strategies
==================
The information is from bookmarked sections of Google's Webmaster
Information, Page Rank Information and Guidelines, as well as personal
experience in search engine optimization.
Best wishes for search engine success,
Serenata |
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