My PageRank Blues Are Over
- Image via Wikipedia
As of today, my Google Pagerank Blues are no more. And for those of you who, like me, experienced either a drop in Pagerank or a PR0 after the April 2010 update-here’s how I may have nudged Google into updating my PR.
Warning: this is a little bit technical. So if you’re inclined to fall asleep on technical posts, then I’d advise you to check out my archives instead of reading this post.
- I became a very active user of Google Web Master Tools
- After doing so I noticed a large number of crawl errors on my site-they were almost exclusively 404 errors.
- The 404 errors came as a result of my migration from Blogspot to WordPress.org. Even though I took every precaution to maintain the same url structure there were still a bunch of errors.
- First, I tried updating the incorrect urls. This turned out to be just a temporary fix though because while on blogger I’d installed some mobile widgets which created several different URL parameters.
- Unbeknownst to me when I corrected the first set of url’s, the ones with the mobile parameters were still there-stuck in Google’s cache.
- So the next thing I did was go back to Web Master Tools and told Google which parameters to ignore.
- Next, I noticed something that I should have noticed a long time ago but never did. My canonical URL was beninbrown.com and but my site was using www.beninbrown.com and I never did the permanent 301 redirect to alert the search engines that www.beninbrown.com and beninbrown.com were the same site. I had to pop my own-self on the hand for that one as its pretty much SEO 101 to always check for that.
- To correct it I updated my htaccess file and also notified Google of the update through Web Master Tools.
- After that I updated my site map and notified Google of the new site map through Web Master tools.
This all happened over the course of the last week. And when I looked at my PR a few moments ago it showed 1. Now granted that’s a far cry from the 2 that I had prior to the update but after months of seeing 0, I’ll take it.
Anyone else have a Google PR story to share? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below. Thanks!
Related articles
- Time to Re-Evaluate Google PageRank? (beninbrown.com)
- What is PageRank Good for Anyway? (Statistics Galore) (seomoz.org)
4 Responses to “My PageRank Blues Are Over”
Caleb on October 19, 2010
BeninB on October 26, 2010
Otherwise, take care and hope to chat again in the near future.
Caleb on November 5, 2010
p.s.
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My recent post 7 Free Ways to Internet Market With Yahoo Answers
BeninB on November 5, 2010