ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

I’VE BEEN BLOGGING CASUALLY since 2003, that is, until four months ago. At that time, I decided to start offering training workshops on blogs. So, towards the end of last year, I actually revamped my blog and the way I blog. Recently, it occurred to me that Google’s PageRank for my blog could be quite important. So, I tried to check this out using the PageRank Checker. However, I’ve been quite mystified because the following were what I got:

So, my PageRank (PR) is different for the same URL with and without www? Is my PR = 2+3 = 5?

SUBSEQUENTLY, I entered the Google Webmasters Help group. Was typing a query in the “Crawling, indexing, and ranking” category when Google very intelligently displayed this thread, Different page rank for the same URL with and without www.

According to Webado (aka Christina):

“The difference in PR between www and non www versions of the same url, also between example.com/ and example.com/index.html (for instance) has existed ever since PR has been reported. PR is always relative to the url, NOT to the page content that a url points to. All those url’s are as different as if they were totally different sites.

“At times the PR might appear to be equal – that would be because both forms are being used to about the same extent, and have incoming links of about the same quality and quantity.

“It makes sense to consolidate into one url alone all accesses meant to be for one particular page – the result will also be a consolidation of pr, with a possible increase in the final pr value for that chosen page.

“The new option in Webmaster Tools is there to take care of what’s already been indexed – but you, the webmaster, also have to do your job of redirecting url’s to one single preferred url format.

“Assuming you haven’t done either of these 2 things, and assuming your 2 url’s used to have the same PR and now are different, thats’ due to changing conditions. The incoming links to one form must have dwindled, been discounted for some reason, while the incoming links to the other form must have picked up. PR gets recalculated every few months from data a few months old. PR is also not necessarily the same across all Google Datacenters which are numerous and not in sync.”

In another similar thread, Richard L. Trethewey wrote:

“PageRank is calculated through a combination of factors beyond the simple number of links. The exact method Google currently uses is not public knowledge, but in the founders’ original thesis they describe a formula which is widely believed to still be the fundamental method. For each link that points to a page, the PageRank of that target page is increased by an amount roughly equal to the PageRank score of the page where that link resides divided by the number of links on that page. You also need to keep in mind that the PageRank score shown on the Google Toolbar is taken from a publically available database that is only updated periodically (recently, its been every 3 months or so). But Google has an internal PageRank database that they use for ranking purposes which is updated continuously as they crawl the web. There seems to be a PageRank update in progress, so you should wait a couple of days to see if your PageRank score improves.

“But the best thing you can do for your site is to set up a server code 301 redirect for all requests for pages from the old .com domain and redirect them to the new .org.uk domain. In a few weeks, all of the major search engines will merge their records of the two domains and your rankings should improve. It would also be a good idea to ask thewebmaster of any site that still links to the old .com domain to link to the new .org.uk domain to help speed up the process. But installing that 301 redirect is very important.”

And so, that’s what I have done recently, adding a 301 redirect to channel all requests for the URL without www to the URL with www. Now, waiting and hoping that my PR will be doubled (almost) soon.

(See also Matt Cutt’s SEO advice: url canonization and Michael Bloch’s Giving search engine spiders direction – 301 redirect.)