Mystery of the Google PageRank Solved
Just for the heck of it, tonight I checked my Google Pagerank again at Popuri… sure enough it was the big goose egg. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Out of curiosity, I entered http://www.douglaskarr.com instead of http://marketingtechblog.com… and voila! There it was in all of it’s glory! PageRank = 3 with 1,050 backlinks to my site.
This is a little bizarre to me because I signed up (free) on Google Webmasters and set my primary domain with the www, not without. So I really have no idea why that setting is even in there.
So… I did a few things tonight to try to ensure that I have consistency throughout the way my domain is called internal to my site:
- I cleared my preference on Google Webmaster and again submitted that my primary domain should utilize the www.
- I set my htaccess file to redirect any requests from http://douglaskarr.com to http://marketingtechblog.com. Be sure to edit your existing .htaccess file if it exists (it may be hidden from your FTP client):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}
^douglaskarr.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://marketingtechblog.com/$1 [L,R=301](Edited: 4/11/07)
- I did a search and replace in MySQL to ensure that my domain was always referenced with the www. I updated both my posts table and my comments table (for the URL):
UPDATE `wp_posts` set `post_content` = replace(`post_content`,'http://douglaskarr.com','http://marketingtechblog.com')
Perhaps this was a waste of time, but I figure it's not going to actually hurt anything. Any thoughts from our SEO experts out there?
