Dirty Domains Damage SEO

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Toolbar pagerank used to be all the rage and most optimizers were all about creating those green pixels and maintaining it through any means necessary.

One of the things optimizers noticed early on was that Pagerank seemed to be site based and distributed from “the top down”.

What this means is that if your homepage was a low to mid PR5, any pages directly off the root of the homepage would be a PR4. Subfolders directly off the homepage would also be a PR4. But pages within the subfolders would be a PR3.

• yourdomain.com = PR5
  yourdomain.com/your-page.html = PR4
  yourdomain.com/your-folder/ = PR4
  yourdomain.com/your-folder/this-page.html = PR3
  yourdomain.com/your-folder/another-folder/ = PR3
  yourdomain.com/your-folder/another-folder/another-page.html = PR2

Back then, the higher your toolbar PR was, the higher the likelihood that your pages would rank (that wasn’t all there was to it – lower PR could beat higher PR, but toolbar PR was a big portion of things in those days). So a lot of optimizers took to creating “root based” sites. Which essentially means that every page of the site was built off of the root.

• yourdomain.com = PR5
  yourdomain.com/your-page.html = PR4
  yourdomain.com/your-folder-now-a-page.html = PR4
  yourdomain.com/your-folder-now-this-page.html = PR4
  yourdomain.com/your-folder-another-folder.html = PR4
  yourdomain.com/your-folder-another-folder-now-another-page.html = PR4

Back in the day it made sense. Nowadays, it’s pointless and messy.
First things first, Toolbar PR is for entertainment. Most optimizers have known that for a long time. Secondly, PR either didn’t remain or never was “site based” (you can decide that one) and is instead based on the individual page factors (like inbound links). Thirdly, the Google algorithm is no longer a one ingredient wonder. Nowadays, we have trust, age, authority and varying other factors contributing to how a site ranks in addition to Pagerank.

In addition to the strategy now being pointless, it’s also messy.

Not only do you risk getting crawlers confused with a lack of a logical site structure, but it is also beyond annoying to someone who has to work with a site to have to trudge through a root based site with several hundred or thousand pages.

It’s like opening a huge walk in closet to find a tie only to not be able to even walk into it because everything is simply thrown on the floor with no rhyme, order or reason.

But it seems a lot of “SEO firms” didn’t get the memo and we are constantly seeing sites with this “SEO method” employed.

A response to this posting and corrective changes will be posted momentarily.