Help understanding PR

[diskwizz]

Hi folks. I have a site which i will keep nameless to prevent me being shouted at
The problem I have is this: The site has been up and running for about 3 weeks and has eventually ranked 83 on google from a possible search of 1.8million pages. However I have since added a links section and have added sites thru that with recriprical linking and most sites are also subject related. Since I have done this i have fallen out of the top 1000 on Google.
The problem is that I am also climbing the ranking with other sites such as Yahoo and Alta Vista Lycos etc etc.
What should I do? Keep adding links and climb with the others or scrub all the links and hope that I climb Google again?
Any comments much appreciated.
Thanks for your time.

[Sinfully Wicked]

I'm not sure how your questions relate to PR but i can give you some advice.

There could be MANY factors to determine why your not ranking anymore, perhaps your body copy is lacking in keyword density, perhaps you done have the keyword in your META description. There could be many things wrong.

On the link bulding side, i personally see nothing wrong with reciprical linking, i have done it in the past on clients sites. Reciprical linking is down to personal preference. I don't think that would be why you slipped from Google.

Yes you will be indexed and climbing in Yahoo/MSN because they prodominently go on backlinks. MSN for example spiders everything from session ID's to broken backlinks (might have been a past site you exchanged a link with that no longer exists. MSN still indexes and counts it).

You will see the majority of sites have more links in Yahoo/MSN than they do in Google.

PM me the site, i'll see if i can help you out a little more.

Sin

[diskwizz]

PM sent many thanks for the help.

[diskwizz]

Still having trouble with this, would anybody be able to advise?
I am starting to slip from all search engines and I have no idea why. From what i can see my site is well optimized. Doesnt seem to look like spam to me. Could anybody please give an opinion. I need to have this site doing well in the ranking BEFORE i start to sell spaces on it.
Thanks in advance, Pete

[DNjet]

Hard to say, but if you are using a reciprocal link service or script that could be the problem the search engines have recognised almost all these services and scripts as link spam and dumps your site. If its a link page you did yourself thats ok , but don't put many links on it before creating another page, maybe 20 a page, and make sure the page has plenty of content and not just links, thats a no no.

[diskwizz]

Thanks for that, off it is with the "resources" link then

[gemsergio]

Search Engine they usually give you a boost at the beginning for fresh content and the KW does not look that difficult if there are only 1.8m results.
That is why even with a low page rank or low incoming one way or exchange links you ranked as you did.

[diskwizz]

Would you personally be able to advise of or make any improvements Gem? The website is to help promote the bars in the area. I am not after making a fortune from this site, just a bit of pocket money for a few beers etc. But I know I won't be able to push the advertising on it unless the customers know they will get their moneys worth.
Cheers for the info, Pete

Slightly off topic BUT, why would somebody use a robot.txt file to prevent search engines indexing your site? Surely thats the whole idea about a site, to have it indexed so taht people find it. Or do they have a negative effect in some way?
As you can guess I am still learning, so bear with me.

[gemsergio]

Robot.txt can be used for many things and yes you might not want any spider hanging around parts of your site or exclude certain robots from certain search engine for many reasons.
PM me the URL and I will take a look and for the basics check seochat.com they have good advise for SEO beginners.

Cheers

[copper]

Search Engine they usually give you a boost at the beginning for fresh content and the KW does not look that difficult if there are only 1.8m results.
That is why even with a low page rank or low incoming one way or exchange links you ranked as you did.

"gemsergio" is correct on this.

Not 100% of the time, but, it does give good ranking for new sites for week or two.

It takes more than few weeks to get to top ranking for new sites.
However, if lots of high PR sites are linking to you, then, it's different story.
This is why high PR sites charge good $ for the links

If you are in a hurry, look for related site with high PR, PR5 and above, and get links

[clasione]

Be sure to read Googles explanation of pagerank and what it does and how it works: http://www.google.com/technology/

[longhand]

@diskwizz
to improve PR submit your website to many directory sites. You find list of them at directorycritic.com

to improve your Search Engine Position check with Yahoo from where your competitors get inlinks and subscribe your site too of them where possible
(type in yahoo: linkdomain:yoursite.com)

Regards,
Longhand