Interpreting Data from Webmaster Central - Page with the Highest PageRank
Posted on January 11th, 2007by Michael Gray in Google, SEO
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I’m really a big fan of webmaster central it’s about the closest you’re going to come to getting some info about the “health” of your site in Google.
One of the things you should pay attention to is under the “statistics” in the “your page with the highest pageRank” section. Generally speaking this page should stay fairly constant, Google will think one particular page is the “most important”. I’d even suggest you go to some to some effort to make sure it’s not the homepage, but I digress. If you “play” in the viral game this can also help you get an idea of what Google thought of your viral efforts and how well they worked.
For one of my sites it’s been the same page ever since I put it in the program, rock solid, every month. About the time of the update that wasn’t an update I noticed a drop in traffic. I logged into webmaster central and saw the page that was “most important” had changed to the homepage, but remember it wasn’t an update. My working theory is Google changed the way evaluates certain inbound links, or entire sites but I haven’t looked at enough data to say that with any real sense of confidence, just a gut feeling. What’s important was my drop in traffic corresponded to a “health” change in Google. After tinkering google now says one of my newer, mildly successful viral pages is now the most important page. the [site:] still shows supplemental pages that were wiped at least a year ago on the first page, so my work there isn’t done, looks like time to work on writing a viral compilation posts or round up posts to get the spiders looking around again.
Sphere: Related Content
January 11th, 2007 at 10:00 am
I’m still perplexed on how this all works. I look at my pagerank in the Google toolbar and watch it bounce up and down throughout the day. Also, did google hire the population of China to rank and monitor everyones pages? Seems like alot of work.
January 11th, 2007 at 10:36 am
You could also work on things like tagging
Your category optimization is effective as you have every post on one page for the category. If you agged tagging, it would result with fewer pages on some of the tag pages.
Ball linking is sometimes quite effective on blogs in sharing out the link equity.
Alternatively, transfer all your link equity to a sitemap to distribute it more evenly internally.
January 11th, 2007 at 11:21 am
tony rocks - by simply linking an old post from the index page of your site you are passing favor to that post. think of your index as a clipboard and use it wisely.
January 11th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
So what does it mean if you don’t have a “your page with the highest pageRank†section? For a few of my sites, the section is missing, others have it where I expect it to be.
Thoughts?
January 11th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
SEO Bozo- Good idea. I will try that approach more!
thanks man!
January 11th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
“I’d even suggest you go to some to some effort to make sure it’s not the homepage, but I digress.”
Please digress, Graywolf… why would you argue that?