Lower PageRank: A Migrating Website’s Dilemma
Every web developer, company, or budding teen blogger desires more viewers to their website via more visibility on search engines. In order to accomplish this, these websites need higher PageRank and need to complete certain steps during search engine optimization or SEO. The latter is most important when trying to increase PageRank, yet many websites suffer during migrations—the process of moving domains, consolidating URLs, or copying URLs. Why this happens is the basis of an article by Dawn Anderson, a SEO & Search Digital Marketing Strategist. With the focus being Google, Anderson explains that the drop in PageRank may not a cause for concern or—at the very least—cannot be fixed quickly.
Google uses the tool Googlebot in order to update rankings and collect data. However, there are several factors that go into the search engine determining PageRank. Two key elements combine to produce this rank: the importance of the linking URLs and the URL scheduling of Googlebot. The article makes it clear that PageRank does not equal page importance, though importance can influence rank. For example, if the links on a website lead to relevant, substantial information in regards to the overall topic of the database or website, then that would improve the importance that Googlebot assigns it as well as the PageRank. In order to evaluate the importance of links, the webpage and some of the accompanying URLs must be on the schedule.
The internet is growing tremendously each year giving Googlebot less time to make evaluations. As a result, it is given a schedule that places importance on different URLs. The Wall Street Journal, to name a popular site, may be visited daily to collect information and update PageRank, because it has a heavy network traffic and relevant information. Since news becomes old quickly, it may not visit many links on the website due to its need to keep on schedule. When websites migrate, it places extra stress on Googlebot to stay on schedule due to the incomplete copies in links, multiple webpages with the same data, and double the amount of links to follow to acquire accurate data. Thus, PageRank suffers as a result. However, Google architects and Anderson assert that once a webpage fully migrates, then its PageRank will be updated and corrected accordingly. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned reasons, that update may take anywhere from days to months in order to fix.
For more information and access to the full article, follow this link: http://searchengineland.com/crawl-budget-url-scheduling-might-impact-rankings-website-migrations-255624.