I’m not obsessed with PageRank. I really enjoy new visitors to my website and I want them to feel comfortable trusting my content. I also want my customers to believe in my abilities and my advice. However, most visitors don’t really care about the PR of my site. There are numerous high value, low PR sites out there, so I’m not that concerned. Seriously, for a few years John Chow wasn’t allowed in the Google index and didn’t have a PR at all.
Now, since I don’ t play the PageRank game, I’ve never been focused on gaining rank or feared losing it. Until today, my site was a PR2. Nothing to write home about, but a respectable PR for a site that’s not concerned about it. I have a SEO toolbar that tracks PR, links, etc and frequently use it on other sites. This morning, I noticed that my PR had dropped to 1. Now, PR2 isn’t amazing to start with so it’s not a huge problem, but it is a 50% decrease in PR.
I started thinking about what could have caused this…and I quickly came back to DoFollow. If you’re new here, I eliminated the NoFollow tag in my comments section a month ago. Of course, I had some spam issues to start, you can read about spam on DoFollow sites, but overall, it’s been a good decision. I’ve seen more traffic, more comments, more feed subscribers, and more meaningful interaction on my site.
Of course, most of these visitors arrive out of self interest, i.e. getting a dofollow link to their site. But don’t most people comment or visit sites out of self interest? Even on NoFollow blogs, people leave comments to drive traffic to their site. Some of my favorite sites drive quite a bit of traffic to my site because I comment on their articles frequently.
So, at the end of the day, I think my site probably got hit by Google because I’m giving away DoFollow links. Sucks for me, I guess, but I’m not going to loose too much sleep over the situation. I guess if they remove my site from their index, I’ll have to change something up, since it defeats the purpose of having a website if folks can’t find the site. But, if my punishment for helping create a more open web is a PR hit, I’ll take it.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Page rank means nothing Eric. I have a few AdSense sites. One gets 3,400 visitors per month and with a PR2 and makes me around $10. The other gets 6,000 visitors per month with a PR0 and makes around $50 a month…
These stats have remained constant for a year as I’ve never changed any content on the sites…
Just a few suggestions.
You may want to use bold/underline/italics, bullet points etc.. in places on your site to define keywords & phrases preferably something to do with the page/post title as that’s what Google gives the most weight to. Otherwise your pretty much optimizing for everything. you have to give something a bit of extra weight.
Get rid of duplicate content on each page as much as possible.
Use Alternative text or Title tags for you images with useful keywords.
Don’t stress too much though buddy. It will drive you mad.
Thanks for the comment. I’m not a huge fan of playing SEO. I do a bit for clients, but generally focus on creating good content and organizing the site properly. I’ve tried bold, italics, etc before to limited success. But you’re right about not focusing on the PR, it will drive you crazy. Same with Google Analytics/WP.com Stats. I’ve had to limit myself to a visit a week to keep from going nuts.
Thanks
Hi Eric
Dofollow is not a exact reason for loosing page rank. As Mattcutts said and based on google algorithm page rank is nothing but quality of page and authority of website/weblog. It considers many factors like content quality, age, uniqueness of article and so on. So don’t worry about PR. It just a benchmark. Not helping to earn more.
And i notice that, Your Home Page link is set as Nofollow, That might be the cause of PR drop. Please set your Home page link as dofollow.
Hmmm…thats sucks
But I don’t think that the dofollow is the cause
Page rank isn’t everything, content quality is what matters most