Home page full of duplicate content affecting page rank.

[pokerextras]

This is something that i've been thinking about, and would like to know others views. My homepage content is basically all duplicate content, as it almost totally consists of outlinks (trackers) and my site and backend are a skin of another. I know that under normal circumstances, the more unique content i have on my site, the more chance of a high page rank, but will it really matter if i have 50 pages of unique content, if all my inlinks are pointing to my homepage which has none? Will it always be pr0?

[kingcobra]

This doesn't affect your page rank although it may affect your search engine positioning. It's the search engine results that bring the traffic, the only thing the toolbar PR is good for is for trading links, although real page rank does figure into results as well.

When your site is crawled the entire site gets credit for your unique content so it doesn't really matter where it is, although you should have some on your homepage with your keywords in it.

If you want page rank on your home page then you have to have links pointing to it, preferably with PR.

Ideally you'd avoid duplicate content as much as possible as unique content is much more loved

[Randy]

PageRank doesn't have anything directly to do with your content. It's a function of links pointing to your page.

It's important indirectly, because good content increases the likelihood of getting more and better links.

[kingcobra]

Originally Posted by Randy

PageRank doesn't have anything directly to do with your content. It's a function of links pointing to your page.

It's important indirectly, because good content increases the likelihood of getting more and better links.

I've actually had a couple of people link to my site because they like my content although it did take 5 years to get one of these

Speaking of PR, I see that you opened up with PR2 on the toolbar on the first update Randy at your new site, nice job there. I've got a question for you though and anyone else who cares do answer who knows what they are doing here. Do you take advantage of non-poker sites in getting your good PR links? I've messed around with some other gambling related ones, and you know my position on that, less valuable for sure since your KW's aren't on the page much if at all, also messed around a bit with unrelated stuff as well, the jury is still out and I'm wondering what other people's experiences are here. It's nice to say stick with poker but the opportunities are a lot broader the looser your standards are here of course.

[pokerextras]

Just as i thought i was starting to understand seo, i'm being told that page rank has nothing to do with search engine results. I thought that they were one and the same. Somebody asked me to swap links with them the other day who had thousands of inlinks showing on yahoo, but still had pr0. If pr is only about links, why was this? Also, and more importantly as far as i'm concerned, is there a quick way to see how high i feature for certain keywords without downloading anything. An in browser option?

[kingcobra]

Originally Posted by pokerextras

Just as i thought i was starting to understand seo, i'm being told that page rank has nothing to do with search engine results. I thought that they were one and the same. Somebody asked me to swap links with them the other day who had thousands of inlinks showing on yahoo, but still had pr0. If pr is only about links, why was this? Also, and more importantly as far as i'm concerned, is there a quick way to see how high i feature for certain keywords without downloading anything. An in browser option?

Well no we're not saying that PR has nothing to do with search engine results, it's part of it for sure. What we're saying is that toolbar PR is a tool to be used to swap links and it really isn't valuable beyond that. Real PR, the kind that updates in real time not quarterly, is in fact a component of search engine algorithms. It's not the whole story though by a long shot.

You don't get to see the real PR though and what you want to focus on if search engine results are what you are after is to focus on search engine results. Linking does help this. The toolbar though is the bait for link trading, so you want to look at it in these terms.

For example, my toolbar PR has gone up after this update but it didn't put my search engine results up. Some of the things I've done to cause it to go up, a while ago, did improve the rankings.

Hopefully this is a little clearer now

[pokerextras]

Do you know if alexa page rank is any indication of how well you'll position with google?

[kingcobra]

Some say it does have an effect, I tend to agree here although there really isn't any hard evidence one way or another and this is pretty hard to test out. This measures how much traffic your site gets and the thinking is that they want to reward based upon popularity so they may have this built in. With that said, the ranking is based upon how many Alexa toolbar users visit, which skews it heavily toward how many webmasters visit.

So if your site is aimed at webmasters then you're going to have a lot higher ranking then you deserve. If you trade links a lot then this will put you up artificially a bit as well. At one time you could manipulate your own rankings somewhat by visiting your own site and having the toolbar, they've gone a long way toward putting a stop to this lately and they have it set where your visits can get blocked just for visiting your own site for natural purposes. I've had this happen to me a fair bit just by putting up links and pulling the url's to verify.

My advice would be not to really focus too much on this and it's one of those sub metrics that you're better off focusing on the real thing which would be your actual traffic. If there are any SEO benefits to having more traffic and there likely is, the real traffic will deliver it anyway.

[pokerextras]

I realised that alexa counted your traffic, but didn't realise that it effected your alexa page rank. Mine only goes up and down when i add or remove pages. I added a page last night, and i immediately went up about 30k positions. Obviously nobody had viewed this page yet.

[kingcobra]

Originally Posted by pokerextras

I realised that alexa counted your traffic, but didn't realise that it effected your alexa page rank. Mine only goes up and down when i add or remove pages. I added a page last night, and i immediately went up about 30k positions. Obviously nobody had viewed this page yet.

Well you've viewed some pages on your site at least when you do this and if you have the toolbar and aren't under some kind of suspension then your visits count as well. I looked at your site though and like most sites you're in the weekly update category which means the stuff only updates that often so this is a coincidence I guess

Once you get in the top 250K or so then you'll get daily updates and the graph will populate but this still all has nothing to do with putting up content