Which Webpages Get Page Rank

Back to looking at which pages get page rank and which don't inherit anything.

Recently I took on a new customer with an existing site. He was a bit upset that his current webdesigner was going to charge £60 + VAT just to renew the URL (the guy is using the same registrars as me and they charge under £8 plus VAT). He was also shifting his concentration slightly away from scooters and more to motorbikes, so wanted a copy of the website under a different name.

It's an OK looking website so it was just hosting changes, plus I gave him a content management system so that he could change the bikes he had on display - with his previous designer he had to send him the details and once every few months the bikes would be changed. That was another bug-bear!

So I took over the website, created new pages to display the bikes (PHP rather than HTML to access my database) and created a copy of the site, with a different sort order - let's avoid that duplicate content filter.

He's just asked me to make a slight change to the sites, so I was looking around the pages. Most of the pages, including the new ones, are now in at PR0. In fact, both sites have the same distribution of Page Rank.

On both sites the home page is PR0 - not something to be proud of, but then it's not an SEO optimised site - it's a contact point for his magazine adverts.

On both sites all of the bike details pages are also PR0.

The enquiry form, with very little content (just the field names) is PR0 on both sites.

The contact form on both sites, with matching address, phone numbers and email address (word for word the same - both display the one email) are both PR0 - so much for the duplicate content filter...

But the 'company' page - with details about the company and 125 words in the text as grey barred on both sites. Both pages are cached, so it's not that the search engines haven't found them.

The only major difference, and this is because it's a site I've inherited rather than designed, is that the company page is reached only by an image map link, whereas there are text links back to the bike pages, the home page and the enquiry form. There's not even alts / titles within the image map - something I would have done if I'd written the site myself / been asked to optimise it.

But this alone is not stopping the inheritance of page rank as the contact page is also only available through the same image map. And that's got PR0. Depending on how you count it, it's only got around 20 words of text on that page.

So, the company page isn't grey barred (on both versions) because it's only linked through an image map and it's also not grey barred because it's not got enough content - the contact page has less. So what can it be?

The smallest bikes page has around 250 words on it, along with pictures of 4 bikes. There's no links to other pages or anything, you have to phone for details.

So I think it's one, or a combination of:

- Google doesn't like the duplicated information, but is happy when the duplicate information is contact details.

- Google doesn't like the content.

- Google is cleverly detecting which pages could be of interest to people.

I suppose it is the pages that are most likely to be of use to people searching the internet that have page ranks. People aren't likely to be searching for the company history, but might want to contact them after seeing a magazine advert or might be searching for an offer on a bike.

I think a few more investigations are required to see the effect of page rank on other sites I manage.