Hi,

we have been working on optimising our site for some time now and would be really greatful to anyone who can take a moment to consider our question.

Many Thanks,

Paul



For various reasons that I won't go into now we moved from the www. onlinepoolchemicals.co.uk to the www. onlinepoolchemicals.com domain. This happened about 3 months ago.
The .com domain was registered in feb 2004.

One main one was that we were concerned about the adverse affect that being linked to by various 'dodgy' parts of the internet might be having on our SE rankings. We had unfortunately previously engaged a snake oil salesman SEM to do SEO and we believe his practises were not particularly ethical.

After we had done most of the work but not switched we found this forum and asked around and some people voiced that this may not have been necessary so under advice we did a 301 redirect from the old to the new site when we did the switch.

We have not built significant links to the site (just the old ones) and are about to engage in this in earnest but we have plenty of legitimate content.

So. My question is - why do we have a page rank of 0 when the site has been indexed by google and the content is (to our understanding) fairly well optimised and there is a decent amount of legit content. Is it JUST about links or have we done something 'spammy' without realising it - or is it something else???

The site struggled in it's old home on the .co.uk and we are now engaged in a process of ever increasing user focussed content , friendly useful newsletters, etc etc. Doing it the 'right' way.
We are concerned that doing all this work on links etc won't have any effect on SERPS because there is something we have missed.

We have used image replacement for the header logo which is a h1 containing a small phrase containing our keywords but that is a widely used technique for accessibility reasons and we can't believe that is causing a problem - it would penalise too many legit sites to be useful to google.

Many Thanks,

Paul

>Is it JUST about links

yes, PR is JUST about links except in the case of a greybar, which can indicate a problem. whatever PR the old site has should follow the 301 but that doesn't mean that the toolbar will show it. You have to wait for the next toolbar export if this is concerning you. Worth noting is that if the old site was indeed penalized then the penalty can also follow the 301 depending on what kind of penalty is.

thanks. Tis was our concern. We will sever the 301 and see what happens. Naturally we are pretty convinced that a load of links from suspect russian brides sites and all sorts of other nonsense is not going to help our ranking for pool chemicals. There were some other legit links in there but we will have to lose those and try to reestablish to know. All The Best,

Paul

if pagerank is what you seek, it may be worth waiting for the toolbar to update before you sever all previous ties. Your ranking on Online Pool Chemicals is in number one position so it's unlikely that your site is penalised.

Pagerank aside, have you found that you actually lost rankings? Can you obtain any further clues from Webmaster Tools?

I think the majority of your backlinks to the .co.uk site have nofollows attached so will not necessarily be perceived as spammy. A waste of money from a link building perspective though!

when you will stop concentrating on PR then you will get good PR, just do your seo work