Page Rank gone down to 0

Freeway
1

Hello. My site did have a Google Page Rank of 3 or 4 (when I looked a year or two ago). It now has a Page Rank of 0.

Why this reduction? The only big thing to have changed is the design / content. I understand from a previous thread that the HTML text is potentially too minimal for Google’s liking, but plenty of sites have minimal text, for example http://www.glock-uk.com and this site has a healthy page rank.

Perhaps Google thinks I’m trying to cheat it? To get the ranking back, I’m thinking I need to remove all the H3 headings and the link in the footer (containing my keywords)? See:

Thanks for any help

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2

One thing I see on your home page is that you appear to have two H1
tags. You could make the H1 a single tag simply by using a “soft
return” at the end of Advocate ethical design (option return).

You might also want to group your graphic tiles with their headlines
and keywords, because as it stands, they are being rendered as
separate rows in the layout, rather than being collected together.
This could all be structures so much more simply, and Google would
reward you for that, because you wouldn’t have the link (attached to
your graphic tile) a million miles away in an unrelated part of the
code.

Start by creating a single tile. Draw an HTML box large enough to hold
one tile, plus the extra width needed for your gutters and the extra
height needed for your vertical spacing. Double-click inside of this
box and insert a Graphic box as an inline element. Put your first tile
in that box. Apply the link to the image, then while the image is
still selected, open the Hyperlink dialog and use the Extended
interface to add rel=“nofollow” to the link[1]. Then double-click next
to the image (inside the outer HTML box), press Return once, enter
University of Oxford, press Return again, and enter Spring 2011 case
study. Apply your link to the University of Oxford text.

Now drag this composed tile HTML box off the page onto the pasteboard,
and draw a single HTML box large enough to hold ALL of the tiles in
your design. Click on the off-screen HTML box, Cut it to the
clipboard, then double-click inside the second HTML box so you get a
flashing text cursor and paste. Click once on the now inline HTML box,
and set its Float to Left. Copy it to the clipboard, then double-click
next to it and paste, paste, paste until you have enough boxes for all
of your content. Go back through and change all of the tile images and
text and links. Be sure to retain the rel=“nofollow” attribute on the
image link (this will happen automatically if you follow these steps).

What you’ve done is create a nested hierarchy of information in the
resulting HTML code. This will make tremendous sense to Google, where
your current layout makes almost none. For added bonus points, go
through all of the boxes on the page and see what their ID is set to.
Most times they will be item23aaab or something suitably cryptic.
Change these to something more readable. You’ll have to use CamelCase
to indicate multiple words, so this will be fairly low-value work in
the end (unless you can have single word names for everything) but
anything is better than the defaults.

Walter

  1. rel=“nofollow” is a strategy used by Google to keep multiple links
    to the same URL from causing your page to be down-ranked. You should
    only have one link on any given page to any one URL. Any more, and it
    starts to look spammy. Any other links on the same page to that same
    URL should be marked nofollow. To do this, use the Hyperlink dialog on
    the link, click Extended, then New, then enter Name: rel and Value:
    nofollow in the sub-sub-dialog. Okay out of the stack of dialogs, and
    when you publish, your link should have this attribute added. I
    suggested that you so mark the link on the image rather than the text
    link, because the image has much lower semantic value than the text.
    Inside the text link, you have text, which Google can read as well or
    better than you or I. But the image has just about zero value, except
    maybe for its alt tag or filename.

On Mar 30, 2011, at 5:01 PM, Mark wrote:

Hello. My site did have a Google Page Rank of 3 or 4 (when I looked
a year or two ago). It now has a Page Rank of 0.

Why this reduction? The only big thing to have changed is the
design / content. I understand from a previous thread that the HTML
text is potentially too minimal for Google’s liking, but plenty of
sites have minimal text, for example http://www.glock-uk.com and
this site has a healthy page rank.

Perhaps Google thinks I’m trying to cheat it? To get the ranking
back, I’m thinking I need to remove all the H3 headings and the link
in the footer (containing my keywords)? See:

http://www.advocate.uk.com

Thanks for any help

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3

This particular site will no doubt have about a zillion inbound links
from all the “gun enthusiasts” out there. You can’t buy that kind of
pagerank.

Walter

On Mar 30, 2011, at 5:01 PM, Mark wrote:

but plenty of sites have minimal text, for example http://www.glock-uk.com
and this site has a healthy page rank.

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4

Never mind that bit about “gun enthusiasts” I was totally mistaken, I
should look before I type. Just view source on their page. There’s
very very little of it, which means that the ratio of human-readable
words to structural code is very good. View source on your own page,
and compare and contrast.

Walter

On Mar 30, 2011, at 5:01 PM, Mark wrote:

but plenty of sites have minimal text, for example http://www.glock-uk.com
and this site has a healthy page rank.

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5

Hi Walter

I owe you one. If there is anything I can ever do for you let me know.

I’m working my way through your notes. Got a question; is an items ID called ‘Title’ in FW? i.e. I need to give all my items a more readable ‘title’.

Thanks

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6

Yes. Here are the Cliff’s Notes on what constitutes a “legal ID”.
(Unfortunately, Freeway doesn’t let you use underscores in IDs, but
5.5 at least lets you use the hyphen to separate words.)

An ID must begin with a letter from a-z, or an underscore, as its
first character. You may use upper-case letters if you like, but
remember that these are case-sensitive when you’re trying to do clever
things later with CSS or JavaScript.

An ID may never contain any punctuation characters besides the hyphen
or the underscore.

An ID may contain the numbers 0-9, but only in the second or greater
character position.

An ID may not contain spaces.

An ID must be unique on the page. (Freeway will enforce this for you,
silently adding a 1,2,3 etc. to the end of a duplicated ID.)

When it comes to form elements, you have to be careful with Internet
Explorer. First, it gets confused when you have an input field with an
ID that is not the same as the field’s “name” attribute. Second, it
tends to mix up form event names with form element names. If you name
a submit button ‘submit’, IE will not send that field along with the
other fields to your server. So if your form handler is looking for
the ‘submit’ element as a test to see if the form was indeed
submitted, the form will work perfectly in normal browsers, and fail
silently in IE. So for this same reason, you probably wouldn’t want to
name a button ‘click’, or ‘mouseover’ or any other event name.

Walter

On Apr 1, 2011, at 9:20 AM, Mark wrote:

Hi Walter

I owe you one. If there is anything I can ever do for you let me know.

I’m working my way through your notes. Got a question; is an items
ID called ‘Title’ in FW? i.e. I need to give all my items a more
readable ‘title’.

Thanks

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7

Hi Walter

I’ve done everything you suggest except the inline items/box-model stuff.

I’ll see if it works. If not I’ll have to do the inline items layout.

Any ideas how long it might take Google to upgrade my page rank to what it was - is this an instant thing?

Thanks once again

Mark

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8

On Apr 1, 2011, at 9:55 AM, Mark wrote:

Hi Walter

I’ve done everything you suggest except the inline items/box-model
stuff.

I recommend you do this, it will have enormous benefit and may even
improve your page load time. As your page is currently structured,
there is no coherent connection between the graphic and its link and
the text link and the keyword below it. These things are isolated from
one another in a way that makes your page weaker, because you have
diluted your information about individual topics by placing each part
in a separate area in the source code.

I’ll see if it works. If not I’ll have to do the inline items layout.

The other things I recommended are icing on the cake, the big
improvement is to nest the content in a semantic fashion, which will
make it more machine-readable.

Any ideas how long it might take Google to upgrade my page rank to
what it was - is this an instant thing?

Google indexes and re-indexes sites based on their popularity.
FreewayTalk.net (the Web version of this mailing list) seems to get
indexed sub-hourly. Other mailing list web gateways seem to be every 5
minutes. I have often posted a question on one of the Rails lists (by
mail), then gone back to my search in Google, only to find that MY
QUESTION TO THE LIST is number 3 or 4 on the first page of search
results. Not useful, except in terms of trying to understand the beast
that is Google.

I would recommend that you charge through all of the changes I
suggested, then re-generate an sitemap.xml for your site and submit it
to Google, requesting re-indexing. Then prepare to wait until they get
around to it.

Walter

Thanks once again

Mark

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9

Hi Walter

You mentioned that there is a lot of code on my site compared to the content. I guess I could use the FW option of ‘External Stylesheets’ to minimise the code a little?

I’ve just read the following thread
http://freewaytalk.net/thread/view/55434#m_55564

Mark

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10

There is a lot of structural code in your site. Yes, External
Stylesheets will help quite a bit, but you don’t use a lot of styles
in this page so it’s probably not that big a win. But nesting the HTML
boxes the way I outlined will dramatically reduce the number of lines
of code that are currently being used to create your page layout.
You’ll be able to remove the RPL Action, which does some amazing
things, but also has to create a lot of belt-and-suspenders HTML
structure in order to do it. Everything about your site will be leaner.

Now if you really want to get closer to the Glock folks for sheer
minimalism, I am afraid that hand-coding is probably the only way to
go. Their entire page is basically a couple of headers, a paragraph or
two, and an unordered list. Everything about how it lays out on screen
comes from the CSS file. Freeway can’t currently do that, because it
relies on inline CSS to position each element.

Using an inline construction is a good compromise, because you reduce
the number of moving parts, and make the position of one element
relative to the position of the previous element, which cuts out a lot
of cruft versus a CSS-positioned layout which is then algorithmically
converted into a relative (inline) layout.

Walter

On Apr 1, 2011, at 10:37 AM, Mark wrote:

Hi Walter

You mentioned that there is a lot of code on my site compared to the
content. I guess I could use the FW option of ‘External Stylesheets’
to minimise the code a little?

I’ve just read the following thread
http://freewaytalk.net/thread/view/55434#m_55564

Mark

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11

Hi Walter

I understand what you are saying, but I am reluctant to go down the inline road (inertia and lazyness), that is why I’ve used the RPL Action. Perhaps I should remove the RPL Action to get cleaner code? and hope very few people “zoom text only”

Mark

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12

On the home page, at least, this should take you all of 30 minutes to
an hour to do. It’s really simple, mindless work, now that you have
the layout established. I wouldn’t shy away from it. The benefits are
just too great.

Draw an HTML box somewhere in the pasteboard. Then drag it over the
top of your home page, and position it so its top-left corner is
directly over the top-left “tile”. Drag the opposing corner down until
the bottom edge of the box touches the top of the next row of tiles,
and the right edge touches the left edge of the next box to the right.
This is now your standard box for all except the far-right tile. (That
last tile should be a little narrower; minus the “gutter” width used
in all the other elements.)

Drag it away from the top of the page, maybe up to the pasteboard
above the page, and duplicate it enough times to form a row. Click
once on your first tile photo, Cut to the clipboard, double-click
inside the first tile HTML box, and paste. Repeat with the text below
– select it as text, cut, double-click inside the first HTML box, and
paste. Repeat for each tile in the first row.

If you have positioned your H3 and keyword paragraphs as separate HTML
boxes (you seem to have, based on my recollection of your HTML source)
then go ahead and put them together in the same HTML box as unbounded
text. You can use CSS Styles to push them apart the distance you
prefer, using the space before and space after controls in the Edit
Style dialog. Once you build these styles in the Style palette
(h3.subhead, p.keyword), you just apply them to the entire line of
text (triple-click or quadruple-click to be sure you get the invisible
paragraph character at the end of the line) and that will simplify the
code further.

Once you have your first row of HTML boxes done, draw an HTML box in
the place of where the free-form elements used to be in the middle of
your page. This box will grow to fit all the other rows, so for now
just make it wide enough and tall enough to hold one row. Click on the
first box above the page, cut, double-click inside the new “row” HTML
box, and paste. Repeat for each of the other boxes above the page.
Click on each of these boxes in order, and set their Float to Left.
Your layout will magically appear, using a fraction of the HTML code
do do so.

Then do the same set of steps for each remaining row. You can simply
drag all the other boxes off the page to the pasteboard to make room
for your container to grow downwards, make additional duplicate HTML
boxes inline within that outer box, and cut and paste the appropriate
content back into the inline boxes. I believe you may struggle with
the first one or two, but you’ll make it up on the tail end, when
muscle memory takes over and you breeze through the rest of this
construction. The very last step is to disable the height attribute on
the outer box. That fixes any overflow issues.

Walter

On Apr 1, 2011, at 11:12 AM, Mark wrote:

Hi Walter

I understand what you are saying, but I am reluctant to go down the
inline road (inertia and lazyness), that is why I’ve used the RPL
Action. Perhaps I should remove the RPL Action to get cleaner code?
and hope very few people “zoom text only”

Mark

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13

Blimey, I’ll have a think…

THANKS

M.

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14

Jeremy at Softpress corrected me off-list about one thing here: an ID
cannot begin with an underscore. Just in case anyone in the future was
using a newer version of Freeway that could add one at all…

Walter

On Apr 1, 2011, at 9:44 AM, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

An ID must begin with a letter from a-z, or an underscore, as its
first character. You may use upper-case letters if you like, but
remember that these are case-sensitive when you’re trying to do
clever things later with CSS or JavaScript.

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15

Hi Walter

I made a few of the changes you kindly outlined to my home page, but the Page Rank has stayed a stubborn 0. So, I’m embarking on the inline layout. I’m following your instructions from your message dated 30 March.

The layout looks fine when previewed, but in FW it looks a right mess and it is impossible to use it as a WYSIWYG design tool. I’ve put a screen grab of my FW page here:
http://www.green-edge.org/

Are the items meant to appear staggered? They don’t when I preview the page.

Thanks

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16

I think it’s a bug in the design view. If nor a bug, then at least a difference of opinion.

Walter

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17

Do you have the same bug? Or is this just me?

Mark

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18

If I put a line of float-left inline elements all on one row, they
step down like stairs. Publish (or preview) and they are all in one
line.

Walter

On May 20, 2011, at 2:52 PM, Mark wrote:

Do you have the same bug? Or is this just me?

Mark

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19

Maybe my article on SEO in Freeway Pro can also help you in getting a better pagerank. http://www.dtp2.nl/freeway-pro-seo.html

I know from my own experience that it works and get quite some positive reactions from people using this.

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20

Hi DTP2

I’ll take a look at your article.

Most of the SEO stuff I know. What I’m interested in and Walter is helping me with is cleaning up my code, so that there is less of it and it makes more sense to search engines.

It seems the way to go is the box model route… at least for the home page.

Thanks

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