So, a few weeks ago I noticed that the Google PageRank on my site dropped to zero for some reason.  It used to hover around 3 or 4.  I'm not sure what happened, but it hasn't recovered since.  I still get plenty of links from Google searches and the other search engines.  The site is pretty much fully indexed, according to the Google Webmaster Tools. However, according to those same tools, no site links to mine.  I know this is false because even a Google search turns up pages that link to mine and my logs show plenty of links from real external sites (with positive PageRank values, too).  Yet, doing the "link:www.kf6nvr.net" search reports nothing while the links tool does show external links.  This is all very odd.  Even my wife's site has links to mine.

I decided to do a Google Sitemap, in the hopes that this would help.  However, I didn't really want to spend the time to create one by hand.  I looked around briefly and found an index template for MovableType that would work well for creating a sitemap that would link to all of the individual archives, category pages, and date archives.  This is exactly what I was looking for.

I gave Google a link to it via the Google Webmaster tools, rather than go about it through a ping.  That way I could see if Google thought it was a valid sitemap and see when it downloaded it, etc.  It's unclear what effect, if any, this will have since this blog is fairly well internally linked and Google has probably crawled it already.  However, this is also an experiment for my wife's site where she has found some pages that don't come up with any results at all (as in, terms only on one page don't come up in the Google sitesearch).

I also noticed that the Google toolbar had different PageRank results as some of the calculator sites out there.  That is, on at least one page of this site it showed a 4 pagerank while multiple online tools showed 0.  I'll have to watch for changes in either of them.

In the end, this may or may not help out either site.  I don't particularly care since it's the traffic numbers that matter more than the specific ranking numbers.  Besides, it's mostly just a personal blog where I get to ramble on like this to no one. 

Posted by Shane on March 9, 2007 8:08 AM | Permalink