Google “Mayinner” Update See’s Domain Strength Get Devalued
There seems to be a lot of activity occurring with Google lately, for the past few weeks I have seen organic listings being shuffled around constantly. A lot of people have enquired as to what seems to be happening, people have been noticing that the inner pages on their sites are no longer ranking like they used too.
It seems as though from my point of view that Google are devaluing the power of domain ranking. What I mean by this is that for so long sites that have had a powerful homepage have been also getting inner pages ranked for their keyterms without the individual page actually having any authority whatsoever.
An example of this is the Web 2.0 sites that a lot of people have been targeting such as Squidoo, Tumblr and Ezine, people having been creating pages on these powerful domains and have seen the pages get relatively high rankings. But it seems as though with Google’s latest update this could be a thing of the past as they now seem to be looking more at the individual strength of each and every page instead of the domain that the page it is on. Google have always stated they rank pages and not sites, but this has not been the case until now.
As we all know Google did bring in a new “Brand Ranking” factor which gives more authority towards brands, I feel this and the Mayinner update are going to work hand in hand, as sites such as Amazon are not going to feel the change, but smaller sites which have built up only their homepages as the power horse could now see a huge drop in inner page rankings.
Mind you this is just an observation, let me know if you have noticed anything similar?
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You know, people can tear their hair out, but when Google updates terms, it’s often for a good reason, even if it makes SEO harder. An Ezine page should be ranked according to its own authority, not just the authority of the homepage. I say this as someone who’s used ezine for marketing.
It may be a bit of a pain for SEO, but as someone searching for pages, wouldn’t it bring more quality searches because you find pages because they are strong for your search term and not because the homepage has a high ranking.
Exactly and this should have always been the case as Google indicate, but results have proved not over the last few years.
In my opinion, sites like Squidoo, Tumblr and Ezine have been overrated. For one, I rarely see inner pages from those sites appear in google searches. I’am wondering if sites like hubpages and squidoo are getting ranking where they should be, in the spam categories. Pages on those sites are usually built for one purpose, and that is to promote a service or a site, and not for real content.
I wonder if this change will just affect how those pages rank or if it will also affect the power of links from those pages….because those are possibly two different things. A ‘vote’ from an internal page on a high PR site may still help rankings of other sites a lot. If this update were affecting the power of the links there would likely be a much larger effect on all rankings.
I still believe that domain strength does still exists because I have seen many pages under some authoritative domain such as Ezinearticles.com still got ranked for certain keyphrases. However, I think Google just put more on the filter and level counting strength towards a domain. It would be harder for any domain with less than 5 years old with quality link and content built regularly to have such a status.
I agree with Scrooby that the ultimate aim of Google may be to bring up more quality pages in the SERP’s. The result will show pages because they are strong for the search term and not because the homepage has a high ranking for that term or a high pagerank.
It also may affect all the different “internal link structure” theories to distribute PR as it now may be more important than ever to get external links to your internal pages, not only to your home page.
Good to know that I should be working on getting higher pr on internal pages instead of just the homepage
I usually try and distribute PR to the important web pages by using nofollow on unimportant pages such as terms and services.
This is very interesting indeed. Google are so pesky, when you think you’re close to understanding, they move the goal posts. It does make sense though, as for the searcher, these results will match their search more. I guess this’ll mean sites will have to be more strategic over how they use no-follow.
This is the reason people are complaining on forums that their inner pages have not been ranked in this PR update. I am completely agreed with Scrooby as said that it will bring more quality to search engines results but on the other side it will make optimization harder.
Now it seems to like web site age has more power in Google, it will be difficult to rank well for relatively new web sites.
PR is not so important
i don’t think we should give it so much importance
I think domain authority still works well. I get a lot of my pages ranked high for their keywords.
But I have also noticed that the serps has been jumping around a lot in the last couple of weeks and that there was a PR update.
yeah…I think google is still acting weird today…
Totally agree.. in new Google Webmasters… it speaks for pagerank for individual pages and not the site.. i mean.. it LITERALLY mentions that..
The one who does all the link building in slow times gets the more benefit from Google. The one who will work on individual pages will surely be benefited a lot, whereas the other who work on their site will not be benefited that much.
According to me PR is important but not that much. The important thing is SERP’s if your site ranks in top 10 for a given keyword than it means that you have good credibility. So good SERP’s results will help you rather than PR.
Is the same thing applied for page rank too?…my inner pages were ranking good because of home page authority…when they disappeared in SERPs, I thought its because of lack of deep-link building…but it shocked me to see pagerank bar also got greyed for many inner pages though my internal linking is correct!!!
In my opinion, it shouldn’t be so out of the norm for things to be shifting. People have gotten used to the search engine listings being fairly static once they’ve established themselves. However, if we ask ourselves why we expect this – the only answer is it was that way before. There is no good reason why the rankings shouldn’t move around; after all, the internet is static and search factors vary.
Bob Whitehurst
Keep us SEO folks chasing that last 10% is great for the competition. Google – I think maybe performing testing as I have seen a change in search results based on common keywords and Serp.
Big things are happening over at the big G. Rankings are changing ever couple of hours from what I can see. We’ve jumped a couple pages just over the last few days alone. Exciting times for rankings indeed!