Still No PageRank on the Toolbar
18 Comments Published January 26th, 2007 in Alexa Rank, PageRank, SEO/Traffic/LinksI’ve been puzzling over this for a couple of weeks now. There is still no PageRank showing up on the toolbar for freshblogger.com. I’ve checked out a few different PageRank sites that actually check Google’s data and they’re showing this domain as PR 5. That’s pretty good in my book and doesn’t seem to be far fetched given that I’ve got some quality inbound links.
Here are some of the tools I’ve used to check PageRank:
Visual PageRank (thanks to ProBlogger)
Check Page Rank (thanks to Mike)
Page Rank Checker
Live PR (thanks to Adnan)
Just to take a snapshot of where this site is: the domain is now about 6 months old. Alexa Rank is currently showing at 295,423. Technorati is showing something like 100 inbound links from around 70 sites (these numbers change so I’m not sure how accurate they are). This morning, the feedburner graphic in the sidebar is showing 140 subscribers.
It seems like PR 5 is legitimate. So why isn’t it showing up on my toolbar? Is anybody else seeing it?
18 Responses to “Still No PageRank on the Toolbar”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 26th, 2007 at 6:42 am
I’m not a PR expert, but I’m pretty sure the toolbar PR updates happen entirely seperately from the PR updates from the links you listed.
Which toolbar are you using to check your rank? The one for IE or one of the extensions for Firefox?
Ban your rss feed or /feed/ folder from the bots!!!!!
Google is getting confused to what your real content is. Look at what they are indexing, other than you index page it is all /feed/ pages, which are xml, or made for a machine, not a human.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:freshblogger.com
Just a guess, but they don’t consider an entire site made for a machine that important, e.g. worth pagerank.
Or at least it the fix should help with your traffic.
Look at my robots.txt file to get an idea of how to do it.
Be careful, because a wrong line in a robots.txt may ban bots from the wrong part of your site. use caution.
also expect a big shakeup after the switch, do your homework, don’t change cause I said to.
even if it doesn’t give you pagerank next update, it is a problem for you at the moment,
cheers,
mark
Hmmm that’s an interesting comment Mark and thanks for the explanation because I’ve got the same problem on my site – the pagerank just isn’t showing up! I thought at first it was my toolbar (I use Firefox), but Ray – your site is showing PR0 for me too. (and thanks for the link!)
I’ll be taking a look at robots.txt as I think this may help.
Adnan, you’ve got duplicate content problems. WordPress is TERRIBLE for these issues.
I repeat, TERRIBLE. I think this website is a perfect example, google indexed only the xml feeds. woops!
You see, wordpress creates dupicate content on the page (like index, page 2 page3), then in the feed, then in the archives, then in the permalink. The same text can be in all these places, and god forbid somebody then scrapes you, your one article is everywhere.
On your site blogtrepreneur, sometimes google chooses the permalink, sometimes they are indexing the text from the category link.
You can control the bots with robots.txt or you can let it happen by chance..
I’m not expert and I’ve seen some people benefit from the duplicate content, e.g.google indexes the text from the category pages AND the permalink.
I keep my archives as snippets pointing to my permalinks.
It’s your call, just do your homework first, never listen to me.
Just ideas.
You are PR5, just look at the pagerank of pages that are on your sidebar for a while, most are PR4.
Until just recently the webmaster central blog had zero pagerank, and yesterday Matt Citts still had paes without some PR.
I would Link throuhg to Matts blog, and also the Webmaster central blog as they will most likely see it easier then,
Don’t worry, your PR was well deserved and we all know you are credible to link to
my toolbar shows PR5 when I visit here.
congrats!
Oh on the duplicate content, don’t worry about it too much
For every post I write I gain approximately 10 pages on my blog, depending on if I can dream up more tags.
Matt Cutts has 5 different versions of the posts he makes.
The biggest problem with duplicate content isn’t the pages themselves, but the massive amount of additonal pagerank leaks from their blogroll.
Google was ONLY listing your /feed/ links, or xml pages, this morning, I should have got a screenshot. That seems to have been corrected.
Wow! Thanks for all the comments, guys. I really appreciate all the great advice. I’ve been working hard on SEO for the last couple of months and it looks like it’s finally starting to pay off.
Mark, I’ve been concerned about my lack of a robots.txt file for a while, but I’ve never been sure what exactly to put in it. I’m going to do a bit more research to see what I should do with it, but what you’ve told me is a great start. Oh, and I’m going to check out your $50/day videos as soon as I can, too. Great idea. And thanks for the congrats.
Adnan, FreshBlogger and Blogtrepreneur are both still showing PR zero for me using the search status plugin for firefox and they were also showing zero from work yesterday using Google toolbar for IE6. I wonder if it has to do with my location being served by a Google server that hasn’t been updated yet.
Andy, thanks for the tips and for the great compliment! I should probably be spending more time checking out Matt Cutts’ and Webmaster Central. I’ll try linking to those blogs soon.
Thanks again for all the great information, everyone. I’m sure other readers of this blog will find this to be very useful information, too. I think it’s time for a group hug…
“I’ve been concerned about my lack of a robots.txt file for a while, but I’ve never been sure what exactly to put in it.”
You don’t have to put anything in it!
Even a blank one is better than no robots.txt, at least for me. That says, all clear, index me.
On a newer site I check my “Failure Report” often in my log files to make sure I didn’t break anything.
Bots always check for a robots.txt (and many times a favicon), If you have nothing there the first thing your site always serves to a bot is a 404, in my opinion not a good thing, first impressions and all, lol
So I at least put a blank robots.txt and blank favicon.ico with every new site to eliminate unnecessary 404′s. Just preference.
Good point about having a blank robots.txt….. I need to do that on my sites. SEO seems simple, but there’s so many little things that are easy to miss too.
Hey Mark, I went ahead and added a blank robots.txt file. I’ve noticed all the 404′s from bots not finding one, too. Hopefully, that will help. Do you or does anybody else know how long a pagerank update takes? It seems like it might even take weeks for all of the data to be updated.
Leroy,you’re right about all those little things. It’s a constant process of tweaking the little things after the big ones have been covered.
No idea how long a pr update takes, probably changes each time I’m guessing. You are back to 0 on my toolbar, but I swear it was at 5 yesterday ;-(
good luck
quite weird i would say.
my toolbar pr (firefox) shows 0 for your blog as well. however i decided to use another tool to check your pr (you can find it here http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/).
if i type in your URL with “www” all data centers return a pr3. if i type it without the “www” the pr from all centers is 5. i know there’s supposed to be a difference in whether you use “www” or not. however i still don’t get it why the toolbar doesn’t show it – it’s been quite accurate for my blog.
if anything, it all comes to supporting all those who talk against putting too much faith in the toolbar.
cheers,
cosmin
Some datacenters are considered more dominant when the tool comes to calculate your PR, I see a 5 now, which is pretty impressive, keep it up!
Allen.H
LOL, Mark. I believe you.
Hi cosmin, I’ve noticed the same thing on all the pagerank tools I’ve looked at. It does seem strange that the pagerank would show up for some, but not all visitors. Yeah, I have to agree about the toolbar pagerank not meaning much. Google’s internal pagerank for a site makes a big difference in search engine traffic, though. That probably explains why I’m seeing so much traffic from Google lately. Thanks for visiting and joining the discussion.
Hey Allen, Thanks! I should do some more in-depth research on all this stuff and write an article about it. I’m thinking a dummies version would be nice because so much of what I see discussing pagerank is highly technical.
Thanks everyone for your comments!
For your traffic and links you should definitely be ranked. Could be time?