Hello, I build a chess related website www.thechessworld.com
about 7 month ago. I have pretty much all original content. I know that some very good sites are linking to my site: some of them with PR 6 and 5.
However, my PR is still constantly 0 and I do not know what to do about it. Google indexes about 100 pages of my site, but I do not pop up very well on google searches. I do somewhat better on msn. PLEASE, help! Any suggestions or advices are very much appreciated!

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...important.html

Originally Posted by chrishirst

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...important.html

Thank you for the reply , I actually saw that before I posted. I'm more interested in actions to take to get some (not 0) PR, rather than in philosophy that PR isn't important.

Originally Posted by kasparovda

Hello, I build a chess related website www.thechessworld.com
about 7 month ago. I have pretty much all original content. I know that some very good sites are linking to my site: some of them with PR 6 and 5.
However, my PR is still constantly 0 and I do not know what to do about it. Google indexes about 100 pages of my site, but I do not pop up very well on google searches. I do somewhat better on msn. PLEASE, help! Any suggestions or advices are very much appreciated!

pretty much all original? Which means ? Did you duplicate some content and created other?
If google think you are a duplicate, that could explain why he doesn't want to give your website any relevancy.

Don't worry too much about PR anyway...

Originally Posted by juliensimon

pretty much all original? Which means ? Did you duplicate some content and created other?
If google think you are a duplicate, that could explain why he doesn't want to give your website any relevancy.

Don't worry too much about PR anyway...

Well, it is almost impossible to create a website will 100% original content because it was a world and chess long before me and my site, of course I used some info from official rules of chess and couple of articles that are also posted on other chess websites because they are a great value to my readers. But it's no more than 1% of the info. The rest is all created by me or for me.

By the way, if someone published my work with my name on it on other website with my permission and now I posted it on my own site with my name in it, does it mean I have duplicate content just because i did NOT have a website a year ago?? Nonsense.

Any more suggestions ?? Please!

Try to get more backlinks. This is a great factor to increase your pr.

Ok, you have fresh content (mostly), but do you have visitors ?
And if you have, do they stay ?

Because, you know, a search engine is for people looking for you...
If nobody or almost search for chess related informations, you won't be much visited.
And after all, PR should be an estimation of how interessant for the majority of google users your site is/would be.

My guess is that your demographic segment is shifted too much towards elders/mature peoples.
I did played chess in school, but most of the people my age (33) don't have the simpliest clue about the rules of a chess game.
Talk them about rocking, and they think electric guitar... Not that I blam them, though.

Your main segment might really be more part of local chess clubs than looking on the net about informations.
Or they will use somethings like a FICS client [ http://www.freechess.org/ ], and not be much interested by simply browsing a web site.

I know that you are not interested whenever PR is important or not, but if chess is your thing, don't worry about it. Do your thing, participate, educate, help peoples, and in the end, you might gain a few fidel followers. I say "you might", because nothing is for sure in our world.
If your endeavour is money making through your site (which don't looks like) then your nich is probably not good targeted.
I think that this subject is just not popular enough for the majority of peoples on the net.

make sure you're still updating the site and not just letting it sit. PR takes time.

Google shows 108 pages indexed and 0 links. Google's not exactly known to be completely honest about this stuff though.

IMO PR means very little. Think about it. If you have a good search term, you want to come up in the top several listings in the search engines for that term. If you are trying to improve your SERP position through inbound links, the webmasters I know will look at who is linking to you, how many pages are cached, etc. They will make sure your site and sites linking to you aren't using black hat techniques. PR is so unreliable, that I don't even have it on a toolbar anymore.

So again, IMO, look at your stats, uniques, conversions, etc. PR doesn't really matter.

Originally Posted by tripy

Ok, you have fresh content (mostly), but do you have visitors ?
And if you have, do they stay ?

Because, you know, a search engine is for people looking for you...
If nobody or almost search for chess related informations, you won't be much visited.
And after all, PR should be an estimation of how interessant for the majority of google users your site is/would be.

My guess is that your demographic segment is shifted too much towards elders/mature peoples.
I did played chess in school, but most of the people my age (33) don't have the simpliest clue about the rules of a chess game.
Talk them about rocking, and they think electric guitar... Not that I blam them, though.

Your main segment might really be more part of local chess clubs than looking on the net about informations.
Or they will use somethings like a FICS client [ http://www.freechess.org/ ], and not be much interested by simply browsing a web site.

I know that you are not interested whenever PR is important or not, but if chess is your thing, don't worry about it. Do your thing, participate, educate, help peoples, and in the end, you might gain a few fidel followers. I say "you might", because nothing is for sure in our world.
If your endeavour is money making through your site (which don't looks like) then your nich is probably not good targeted.
I think that this subject is just not popular enough for the majority of peoples on the net.

Thank you, for your reply, it helped me to realize that I need to add more content. The word "chess" is being googled about 200,000 times a day so it maybe not as much as other hign bid words but it's not too bad either. Yes, FICS is a nice place, I play there myself sometimes, but they don't teach you to play chess (almost), my website does. It's different from FICS.

Originally Posted by bill benson

Google shows 108 pages indexed and 0 links. Google's not exactly known to be completely honest about this stuff though.

IMO PR means very little. Think about it. If you have a good search term, you want to come up in the top several listings in the search engines for that term. If you are trying to improve your SERP position through inbound links, the webmasters I know will look at who is linking to you, how many pages are cached, etc. They will make sure your site and sites linking to you aren't using black hat techniques. PR is so unreliable, that I don't even have it on a toolbar anymore.

So again, IMO, look at your stats, uniques, conversions, etc. PR doesn't really matter.

Okay, yes, maybe you are right here. But I still do not understand, I checked backlinks/inbound links with on the site :
http://www.online-utility.org/webmas...n_analyzer.jsp

and it show that www.TheChessWorld.com has 158 backlinks. WHY does googla ignores all that and does not use it to determine a page rank??????

Originally Posted by kasparovda

Okay, yes, maybe you are right here. But I still do not understand, I checked backlinks/inbound links with on the site :
http://www.online-utility.org/webmas...n_analyzer.jsp

and it show that www.TheChessWorld.com has 158 backlinks. WHY does googla ignores all that and does not use it to determine a page rank??????

You could check your backlinks with 5 different tools, you would get 5 different numbers...who to trust is the question?

Originally Posted by juliensimon

You could check your backlinks with 5 different tools, you would get 5 different numbers...who to trust is the question?

I trust that source because backlinks are very easy to check myself: I can just go to the site they say has my link and look it up. The point is this, I have almost 200 backlinks, but my Google PR is 0! It concerns me!

A quick look at some of your links is showing many come from pages with phrases like 'link exchange' and 'link directory' in the URL. I think that's that's your answer as to why you have no pagerank. Google wants to see links that are honest votes. Mass link exchanging is generally not an honest vote from one site to the next.

You should think about getting rid of the link exchange page you have on your site and stop linking out to sites that have nothing to do with chess.

Being hosted by GoDaddy's free hosting service probably doesn't help at all either.

Try to increase traffic on your website in rather then thinking about PR. Create one way links for your website, exchange link with relevant sites.

Originally Posted by vangogh

A quick look at some of your links is showing many come from pages with phrases like 'link exchange' and 'link directory' in the URL. I think that's that's your answer as to why you have no pagerank. Google wants to see links that are honest votes. Mass link exchanging is generally not an honest vote from one site to the next.

You should think about getting rid of the link exchange page you have on your site and stop linking out to sites that have nothing to do with chess.

Yes, I use the GotLinks exchange, but they claim that I will not be penalized by google since they are human operated and have strict ethics code (maybe they are not telling full story here...). Also they have sites PR 3-4 that are linking to me... Anyway, I was thinking about getting rid of that exchange thing. I will probably do it shortly.

Can I be penalized because of free hosting I'm using (I will be switching to premium one in 2 weeks or so)???

Can I be penalized because of free hosting I'm using

Nope.

Also they have sites PR 3-4 that are linking to me.

Maybe they have, but it doesn't mean those pages pass any value (PR or any other) on.

okay do u add backlinks steadily ?
Do u update your site often ?
Do you have fresh and unique content?
are you getting traffic?

if the answers is/are yes....then no need to worry.Dont worry about PR

Do update your site often, get quality links from ur related theme sites. Try to get one way links than reciprocal link exchange. And be calm, PR Takes time.