Google Page Rank Misrepresentation
Until this weekend, Reward Rebel blog displayed a button declaring a Google Page Rank of 2, however, I’ve discovered that I’m guilty of misrepresentation and – worse – that this blog doesn’t have a Google Page Rank at all!
My apologies for this error, which occurred because I was deploying a URL redirect from /blog/ and it is the root domain rewardrebel.com that has the Google Page Rank 2. I had developed a habit of always using rewardrebel.com to direct to the blog and when I used the Page Rank Checker Tool, I automatically entered the root domain URL.
There are many web pages hosted on rewardrebel.com and they are all independent sales pages - there isn’t a website as such on that domain name. The domain was about six months old when I started the Reward Rebel blog, and it’s URL is rewardrebel.com/blog.
I thought I’d make it easier for people to remember the blog name and address if it was simply rewardrebel.com, so I used the redirect.
My knowledge about links, site authority and Google Page Rank was pretty basic, and it didn’t occur to me that what I was doing harboured intricacies that could spawn problems for me further down the line.
Having become further and further embroiled in the development of my blogs, I was pretty oblivious to anything awry until a couple of months ago. I realised that two sets of stats existed on Technorati - one for rewardrebel.com and one for rewardrebel.com/blog – both relating to the same articles!
After some lengthy email correspondence with a guy from Technorati Support – who was incredibly helpful and the experience was much easier and non-techy than I’d have expected – it was recommended that I use rewardrebel.com for my blog address and dispense with /blog, but that was suggested without him knowing that I have many files and folders on rewardrebel.com, even though there isn’t an actual reward rebel website.
I requested that Technorati merge the two sets of stats, but they couldn’t do that, so it was agreed to delete the rewardrebel.com stats, leaving rewardrebel.com/blog. Of course, this didn’t resolve the main problem, and a second set of stats soon began to generate again.
The redirect has now been removed, and I’m still finding instances of the root URL being promoted on my sales pages, where it should be /blog, but I’ll get through them all eventually.
If you consider using a URL redirect, bear in mind that Google and Google Page Rank does not like redirects, and your site’s Technorati Authority will be weakened by being divided between two URLs – although perhaps there’s a way around this that I’m unaware of. No doubt, redirects impact in all sorts of ways I’ve not mentioned (or yet discovered!) and your input here could be very helpful, both for myself and people reading this.
I’ll not be deploying URL redirects again in a hurry… if ever! At the time, it seemed so perfectly straightforward… (cue maniacal laughter fading into the distance).
Layne | Reward Rebel
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