The Google Juice Works Whether Your Site Does or Not
I came across a pretty interesting site today that shows how important links are to your site (just in case you think that they aren’t). I’m not going to reveal the site here because it is not one of my own or one of my clients, so you’ll just have to trust me that all of this is true. This person came to be concerned that none of their pages were showing up in Google.
The site in question is a PR 5 site that is not indexed in Google. Not a single page is indexed, and it never will be until they fix a 500 server error that is in the header of the site. The really strange thing is that the site displays just fine, but the server is returning a 500 error for every page load. Google will not index pages that return a 500 error.
I just think that it is interesting that even though Google can’t index the site, and therefore knows nothing about it’s content, it will still award it a nice PR because of all of the backlinks it gets (lots of edu backlinks). This is just a good example of how PR flows to a site, and really has nothing to do with the content on the site. So if you want high PR, just make sure you are focusing your effort on links.
Subscribe with RSSCategory: Marketing | 469 views | Posted: April 11th 2008 03:11 pm
Comment by Tim
on 11 Apr 2008 at 3:40 pm #
That is interesting. There must even be a connection Google is seeing in the content of the links pointing to the site that is down. I have links from pages with PRank of 6-7 but Google is not giving me credit for them I’ve been thinking because the links are on pages that are dissimilar in content to that on my site. It’s not only important to get inbound links but only inbound links from pages with similar content (or at least similar link descriptions) as in this case.
Comment by James Ehly
on 11 Apr 2008 at 4:08 pm #
“There must even be a connection Google is seeing in the content of the links pointing to the site that is down.” - that is the strangest part, this site is not down, there is just a 500 error in the header (this certainly made it difficult to even see there was a problem). I’ve never seen something like this before, since usually a 500 error will make the server return the 500 error page.