What does it take to get a pagerank of 1?

November 4, 2007 10:04 AM

What's required for a Google pagerank of 1? I'm stuck at 0 - does getting ranked increase traffic much?

I've been operating a site for about a month now, I have a decent number of inbound links, many pages listed in Google but still a pagerank of 0. I've heard it can take time to get ranked but how can I tell if my rank is 0 because I don't have enough links to qualify for a rank of 1 or because I haven't been ranked yet? If my site hasn't been ranked yet can I expect a flood of traffic when it finally does get a rank?

posted by JPDD to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

If the site you are referring to is the one linked from your personal website, I can't currently reach it. The only reason this matters is that if the googlebot can't reach your site it may drop in the rankings. I also notice the site (if it's the site in question) is a reworking of another site with a similar domain name that you used to maintain. You may want to make sure that the two sites don't just duplicate content from each other, maybe have the old one 301 redirect to the new one. Lastly make sure you're not just checking Toolbar PageRank which is updated much less frequently than actual PageRank. I assume you've checked the Google Webmaster help group? Did you try any of the suggestions they have?
posted by jessamyn at 9:16 AM on November 4, 2007

Response by poster: It is the one linked from my personal site and you're right that it's down right now - bah! This doesn't happen frequently however and Google Webmaster tools shows that the googlebot has successfully crawled it several times. There is a 301 redirect from the old domain in place already.
posted by JPDD at 9:23 AM on November 4, 2007

Patience, grasshopper. In my experience, it takes a bit more than a month for a new site's PageRank to show up as anything more than zero in the Google Toolbar. Some of my projects stayed at zero for a few months after their launch; then, at some point (I wasn't paying close attention), they had a PageRank of three.
posted by mcwetboy at 9:25 AM on November 4, 2007

Google doesn't want anyone to know exactly what's involved, because if people did know, they'd try to game the rankings.

Google also constantly tunes and modifies the heuristic, in response to people who do manage to game the rankings.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:29 AM on November 4, 2007

Google also values age. The longer a site has been continuously up and in operation, the better the rank. This is to help direct traffic to useful sites and away from temporary spam / click attractor sites. Patience is the best advice.
posted by TeatimeGrommit at 10:06 AM on November 4, 2007

Best answer: According to Google engineer Matt Cutts:

[...] at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users (see the question below for more details on the timing).

Thus inside Google, your pagerank is probably not zero. It's just that you can't tell what it really is because they haven't exported it yet.
posted by IvyMike at 10:08 AM on November 4, 2007

If my site hasn't been ranked yet can I expect a flood of traffic when it finally does get a rank?

In my experience, no. I've been running a new site for about 8 months now, and last I checked maybe a month ago, it still had a pagerank of 0. I just checked now and the pagerank is 5. I'm not sure when exactly that changed, but my traffic has been increasing at pretty much the same rate since the site launched so it doesn't seem to have made much difference. This would seem to confirm what IvyMike said, that the site had the same pagerank within Google the whole time and they just started publishing it.
posted by scottreynen at 10:25 AM on November 4, 2007

New sites are "sandboxed" for three to six months, meaning you will not have PageRank. This doesn't matter, since PageRank means little to nothing. A PR0 or PR1 site can show up as the top search result for a particular query. Having PageRank does not mean your site will suddenly see some amazing flood of "traffic." If you want traffic, focus on creating and maintaining a bountiful store of high-quality content. If you want traffic sooner, you're going to have to buy it. If you're trying to make money from affiliate programs, get a part-time job at Starbucks instead. Affiliate marketers and arbatrageurs usually refer to their clients as "traffic" because they're just looking at the numbers. The market is so flooded, you can't reasonably expect to make more than a couple hundred bucks a month per site, unless you're spending a lot of time and effort building and maintaining each site. A lot of people have this fundamentally flawed vision that it's some sort of path to getting rich quick and that's just not the case. If you're selling or otherwise providing something of value, you'd do well to invest in a professional internet marketing consultant, or realize that the people who visit your site are not "traffic" -- they're there to fulfill some need, be it informational, recreational, personal or professional, and if your site can provide what they're looking for, you will do well in time. All you need to remember to make sure your site does well is to provide value to your site's users. The better you become at that, the better your site will fare. So in short, don't worry about your PR -- worry about your content. That's what Google is looking for, as well.
posted by MaxK at 12:24 PM on November 4, 2007

Response by poster: I absolutely agree that content is the most important thing to making a site successful - I just wanted to understand the inner workings of big G and get an idea of what I can expect in the future. My use of the term "traffic" wasn't meant to offend, I appreciate everyone who visits my site and it always makes me smile when I get emails, comments and submissions. However, I also like to see the numbers grow because the number of people who visit the site, the length of time they spend on it and the frequency with which they return gives me an indication of how I'm doing on the content side of things.
posted by JPDD at 4:42 PM on November 4, 2007