Wednesday, May 25, 2005

How to avoid losing PR(Page Rank) And Increase It. by Abdillahi Abdillahi



You have built a great web site with quality content and submitted it to the search engines.Then after a few months or even years it gained a good PR(Page Rank) and all that because of your hard work and staying up nights.And you say to yourself wow it finally paid off so lets go out and celebrate.
But there is a very important question which you should ask yourself and it is how can I keep it and even make it better? If you can answer to this question very well then you have nothing to worry about but if you can't then there are a lot of things you should worry about.

Therefore, today in this short article I have explained some tips on how to avoid losing that great PR(Page Rank) your site has and increasing it.You might already know and read about some of the tips but I always say there is someone out there who don't know about them or already know about them but looking for a simple article or tutorial which explains them in another way.

Let me tell you what made me write this article.It all started when I decided to redesign our web site. I wanted to make major changes in page structure etc and I knew what was going to happen when I do that.All of our site's pages had 4 PR(Page Rank)which was better than what they have now because now they all have 0 PR(Page Rank).So I redesigned the site and ignored the tips I have covered in this article because there is always an exception of everything and there was one .I have to say am not an SEO(Search Engine Optimization) expert but I keep learning and as you learn something you slowly become experienced and expert.

Any ways, That is enough I guess so lets see what I'm going to cover in this short article.Im going to start with some tips on for avoiding to lose it then I'm going to cover some other tips for increasing it.OK then here we go .

Do not rename files.

Whenever you rename any file that is a part of your web site you increase the change to lose its PR(Page Rank).There are many reasons which can make you rename your site files e.g. suppose you want to add some dynamic features a certain page which has a .html file extension and the script you are going to use is a server side such as PHP. After you decide to add the feature to that page you will have to rename it to .hp file extension and that will result the lost of the page's PR(Page Rank) because when any search engine spider comes to your site in order to index it then it will look for the old file and it won't find it because it is no longer available or accessible to anyone.

Sometimes this causes the search engine spider to leaver the site or get stack into no where.But there is a way which you can keep the .html file and add the feature you want it to have in the same time make the server read it as a php file.That will be the use of .htaccess/ mod _rewrite .I'm not going to cover about those two as the article is not about them but you can search the web and find many great tutorials about them.So try to avoid renaming any file that is a part of your web site.

Do not change the domain name of the site.

Lets suppose you have a domain name which has 6 PR(Page Rank) but later you wanted to change it so you can get a better one .By changing it you completely lose the PR(Page Rank) of it and all the sub pages.You can still have the old domain and redirect it to the new one and move the old pages to the new one but still that will not work.It will be like starting from zero again and trying to again a new PR(Page Rank) for it because as you know it has a 0 PR(Page Rank) at the moment.So don't change your domain name unless you want to :)

Do not redirect pages or the domain name.

page redirection or domain redirection will result the lost of your site's and its pages PR(Page Rank).Of course there are many reasons which can make us want to redirect a certain page or domain name e.g. You have a page in your site called services.htm and as I mentioned you redesigned the site and renamed all the files to new ones.So you renamed that page to our_services.htm instead of services.htm.Now you ask yourself how can I get or make this new page indexed by the search engines .And as you can see there is a way to do what you want and that is redirecting the old services.htm page to the new our_services.htm page.

Sooner or later search engine spiders will realize what you are doing and they might punish your site and remove it from the index .For that reason and so many other reasons which I cant gather all of them here you should avoid redirecting pages or domains.If you get a new file and design it is better to delete all the old files from your site and use the 404 file not found page which will contain a site map of the new design's links and an error message telling the visitors what happened to that page they followed ,whether they followed it from a site or a search engine.

In that way you don't lose visitors and search engine spiders don't get stack into that page which doesn't exist anymore instead they follow the links in the site map and index the new files .Therefore, avoid using any kind of page or domain redirection.

Now that I covered three tips on how to avoid losing your site's PR(Page Rank) then it is time to cover two tips on how to increase it.Here we go then.

Updated Content

This is very important if you want to increase the PR(Page Rank) of your website.You should provide fresh content and try to update it daily or every two days . No matter what kind of site you have you must have a great content because they say content is king.If you can't provide that content by yourself then get content from similar site or get articles of other authors which write about what your site is or even hire someone to write it for you.As you update it daily you will see your PR(Page Rank) getting better but be patient because it won't happen overnight :)

Quality back links

Quality back links is very important.You should have links with sites similar to your site .Search the web and see sites that are similar to yours and request a link exchange.This will help you and the other site increase your PRs(Page Ranks). Make sure you don't link back to sites that are not similar to your site as this would decrease your current page PR(Page Rank).There are many ways you can increase it but try to use the legitimate way and not anything that might hurt you later.The more you have manu quality back links the more your site's PR(Page Rank) gets better.

Conclusion

As you can see in this short article I have covered some important tips on how to avoid losing your sites page rank and making it better.Of course there are many other tips which can be used along with the ones covered here but I guess the ones covered here are the most important ones.We all want to make our site's rank high in search engines and that is the goal of every site owner.So it is better to know some ways to avoid losing it and some other ways to make it better. That is all for the time being ,Now try to use what is covered here and see the results. :)


About the Author
Abdillahi Abdillahi is a web designer, founder and president of http://kooshin.com , a company providing affordable web hosting and web design solutions to small to medium sized businesses and individuals. For more information , please visit http://kooshin.com