Why isn’t my site’s PageRank changing?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from India. Dileep asks, “Our website is not improving in Google PageRank despite having regular updates and foolproof content authorized by proven editors. What could be the reason for this? Kindly help in sussing out the issue. Thanks very much.” OK, so this is an interesting question. The thing to remind yourself about is that the Google Toolbar PageRank, number one, it’s only updated periodically. So for a while, we would update it relatively often. Now we’ll update it a few times a year. Over time, the Toolbar PageRank is getting less usage, just because recent versions of Internet Explorer don’t really let you install toolbars as easily and Chrome doesn’t have the toolbar. So over time, the PageRank indicator will probably start to go away a little bit. But it’s also the case that we only update this information every few months, and so it does take time in order to show up. The other thing to bear in mind is that you mentioned having regular updates and having proven editors with original content, but that’s not what PageRank is about. PageRank is about the number of links to a site. So check and make sure that you have a good architecture, you’ve got a Home page with well-linked, static links going to the individual pages of your site. Something like a treelike structure that leads to the individual pages can be good. Make sure that the pages that are really important are maybe just one or two links from your Home page so that the PageRank is still relatively high there. And then just make sure that a lot of people know about your content and know that it’s high-quality content. Because if a lot of people are linking to your site, and those people who are linking to you have high PageRank, then you’ll be more likely to have higher PageRank as well. So it’s not just the quality of your content. The quality of your content is a little bit determining how much people will want to link to you, and then that will determine your PageRank. But PageRank doesn’t look at the quality of the text on your site. It’s looking at the number of links and the quality of those links and how they point to your website. I hope that make sense.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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