30 replies to this topic

[meta]

The PR on Findfree is 8, the PR on the sitemap is indeed 4 (considering it was just created a few weeks ago, not bad).

Well, big whoop. The site map on my obscure little nonprofit site has PR4, and it got that with ordinary linking and no ads - we don't even link to commercial sites. A professional with time to invest ought to be able to do this with nice, clean methods and without introducing ads onto a customer's site map.

Meta

[Carthago]

Even this thread is something to learn from. The Freefind is just a service and a way for this company to give a free sitetool in exchange of putting ads on the pages it is delivering. See it as having a link to a chat service for your site but hosted somewhere else.

That is the point and by doing such it is not YOUR page anymore but the page on some other site. Look at the address when going to the sitemap and you will see it is not the one YOUR site has. The same for search results by Freefind.

Keith: If you do have more techniques - as you mentioned - do not spread them in the next months, but put them on this forum and discuss the in and outs of them. I am sure that finetuning every idea can help you and the others.

[Jill]

Any professional site would look really bad to have freefind on their site, with those ads.

Atomz is free and looks a whole lot better. Can be integrated right into your site and look like part of it. No reason to use something like freefind, imo, not with Atomz around.

Jill

[Carthago]

I not think it is the issue if it is looking professional or not just because of some ads. with Freefind you even can have some version without these ads. The Free version can also be integrated into your site.

Point of the original post here was that it is about a linking strategy and at the end the only one who is real linking is you (the user of this service).

Nowadays we see a lot of mixed ideas about a website and the way to use 'tools'to spice it up. I also tried to use this free service and till now there are NO ads at all. The only ones are on top of the results page by text links to other sites. It is like the SE's are doing too with the sponsored links on top of the 1# result page.
There are different kind of sites with the same budgets and if you can bring some extra to a site by using such tool it cannot harm at all, as long as the look of the site will be the same.

The result pages are not for any ranking at all and also database driven. No effect on the ranking too because it is not pointing to a page and this page is as some smell. After clicking away it is gone.

Again it is IMO not affecting YOUR page rank but it is a one way ticket for that to Freeserve.

The million dollar linking strategy will be the secret of the one who discovered it

[Mel]

Well... I don't know - the url of that site is http://search.freefi...1173209&m=0&p=0 and it looks to me like a URL that Google is not going to crawl, even though it may be linked from your site.

This seems to be confirmed by the fact that the page does not appear to be in Googles index.

[Peter]

The reason that the google toolbar gives that site a page rank of 4 is because the original search.freefind.com/find.html (without the question mark and numbers behind it) has a page rank of 5. Every page that is generated through this find.html will be given a PR of 4.

However, that does not automatically mean that google uses this PR to give your page a higher page rank.

A page rank of 4 is easy to get. Every page with reasonable content and a few incomming links gets a page rank of 4. That is nothing special.

And it is not true that your page does not link to them. Every backlink that google shows comes from a page with their search box in it. So it is not that strange that they have this very high page rank.

Their service is to provide a site search engine to your web site. If you site benifits from that service, it is ok to use. But if you put it there just for the purpose of getting a backlink, I would advice not to use it. It gives you a back link, but I don't think it gives the great boost in PR you would think. Google will probably consider a link from just 1 PR8 site (and a PR4 page) pure luck. Besides that, it is an awfull lot of work for just 1 back link.

Best regards,

Peter

[Scottie]

An interesting note:

Simply because the green toolbar shows a PR#, does NOT mean the site is in Google's index.

I have dynamically generated pages with really long urls that show PR but they do not exist in Google's index. It is simply an inherited number from the main site PR. I've watched these pages closely for several months- they are not indexed now and I doubt they will be until I change the URL structure.

As always- the toolbar is flaky! If you want to know if a page is in the index, copy a fairly unique snippet from the page and see if it comes up in a search.

[Jill]

Yep, that's just ghost PR. Which is what the page in question was showing also.

J

[qwerty]

That's something I've been curious about. "Ghost PR" is probably based on the PR of other pages within the domain. It's a temporary estimate based on the idea that the page is "likely" to end up with a given PR (AFAIK).

But how long does it stay that way? Obviously, once the page gets indexed, the toolbar is going to display a more accurate estimate of its PR, but what if it never gets indexed, say because the URL contains a session ID? Will the ghost PR eventually go away and get replaced by a blank?

[Peter]

I just started a new topic about the Page Rank of Google's Tool Bar:

Find it here: Page Rank from the Google Tool Bar

Regards,

Peter

[Keith]

Thank you all for your replies, this sheds light on the matter.

Jill, per your previous post, I will no longer post ideas (even though it made for an interesting debate).

Thank you for your warmness and understanding,
Keith

[Scottie]

But how long does it stay that way? Obviously, once the page gets indexed, the toolbar is going to display a more accurate estimate of its PR, but what if it never gets indexed, say because the URL contains a session ID? Will the ghost PR eventually go away and get replaced by a blank?

Not in my experience.

The pages in my example have had ghost PR since April. It's still there.

[qwerty]

So, we've got yet another reason to distrust toolbar PR

[Peter]

That is not a ghost PR,... it is just a PR that does not get passed on to the pages it links to because that page does not get indexed.

Right?

Peter

[Scottie]

Nope!

It is truly ghost PR. The pages have not been crawled and are not in the index at all. But they show that inherited PR anyway.