Dear Kalena…
I am a dentist who owns his own practice. My website (domain provided) currently has a page rank of zero and zero backlinks. This is despite many attempts to optimize my site, requests for backlinks, etc. I believe I do have a few linking sites with Page Ranks greater than 3. I don’t understand why they won’t show up in google backlinks? (Yes, i have the toolbar.) Any advice you could give me (in lay terms, i’m a website novice) would be greatly appreciated. thanks.
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
I’ve had a quick look at your site and you have a reasonable amount of keyword rich content, but the dentist niche (like many others) is rapidly becoming more competitive. It’s not clear how long your site has been active, but with the PageRank of zero I’m guessing that your site has only been around for a relatively short time. These days Google only updates the published PR of sites a few times a year so it probably doesn’t reflect the “real” PR value of your site. Don’t be too concerned over this – it is likely to improve over the next few months.
Google is notorious for only publishing a very small subset of backlinks. You are better to use Yahoo for checking your backlinks – use a search query of linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com , which will show you most sites that link to your domain (excluding your own internal links). For your site, Yahoo is currently showing 29 backlinks. Yahoo still only shows a subset of your links – but it is typically a lot more than Google shows. For a more accurate list of backlinks from Google you should register your site with Googles webmaster tools.
As you are probably aware, establishing links to your site from external websites is very important to your rankings, so you should always be on the lookout for related sites that might be prepared to link to you – and don’t be afraid to ask. There are many strategies for link building, and many agencies that offer a link building service. You can even learn how to do it yourself via Search Engines College’s Link Building Course.
Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO – Brisbane
Some Observations that might assist someone about this from one site that I look after that has thousands of inbound links, but Google only shows eight. Things that reduce the link: query URL count: Excluding parameters used on links using webmaster tools. 301 redirects from non canonical pages/subdomains. Canonical tags. The real question is whether Google allows the thousands of links to affect page rank, or just the eight. Which potentially muddies the argument for establishing canonical pages by excluding parameters and using redirects.
Link building is a long term strategy, I can understand people when they want and need the results to show up yesterday, but there are thousands of companies with the same motives so give Google a break if they haven’t calculated your back links, and keep building
LT