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Zero Page Rank (PR0)

Webmasters using the Google toolbar will sometimes see that they have pages that have a Page Rank of zero (PR 0). This can cause much consternation, especially where the page has inbound-links with good PageRank and where the page itself previously had good PageRank. It is even worse when it is the home page of the website.

It generally takes a couple of crawls and some good inbound-links before a page acquires enough ranking to show on the toolbar. Toolbar PageRank can also be erratic and updates infrequent. The real PageRank may have changed a number of times before this gets reflected in the Toolbar's 0 to 10 scale.

A site that had a good PageRank that then suddenly dropped to zero may indicate that it has been banned by Google for using black-hat optimization techniques. PR0 bans manifest themselves in different ways. Sometimes the PageRank from the home and most of the internal pages vanishes immediately, sometimes the PageRank drops from the home page and the ban slowly ripples through the site over a couple of updates.

The main techniques that have caused PR0 punishments are Link Farming, Jump or Doorway Pages, Hidden Content and Link Spamming through Blogs and Guestbooks. It seems that PR0 punishments are used so that the pages actually remain in the index rather than being removed entirely as happens to the most serious offenders. It is possible to recover from a ban by removing the offending optimizations and then contacting Google but this is far from guaranteed.

Some SEOers advise against cross-linking with sites that have a PR0 on the grounds that the contagion may spread to your pages. A PR0 backlink will not be worth much, except perhaps for some good anchor text although even this will have limited value from a PR0 page. Secondly the site may have a PR0 due to the aforementioned Google filters designed to detect black-hat SEO techniques and your linked site may get banned too. Unless your domain name is disposable and you already wear a black hat don't link with any site that appears to be using these techniques to influence Google site rankings even if they still have good PR. Of course this doesn't apply to new sites with good content and with a long term potential to grow its PageRank.

Finally pages that are deep within a site may never acquire enough PageRank to show on the toolbar. This may be remedied by restructuring the internal links or adding a site map.

Zero Page Rank (PR0)

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