And google has updated my page rank. ESL go.com is back to pager ank 6. Next stop =7! How? With my new free reciprocal links page I should be getting lost of reciprocal links. I mean hey, both my links pages are ranked at 5 by Google...

I was upset when my main page for ESL go went from page rank 6 down to 5, but I just noticed that Yahoo is down from 10 to 9. I think that makes me feel better.

I recently realized something I've been doing wrong since I started ESL go.com - English as a second language learning and teaching and that is the text of the hyperlinks. For example a link like ESLgo doesn't help for the keyword ESL. That's why a domain name like esl-go might have been better. Now I realize the problem and ask people to put ESL go in the text link. Of course other ESL sites don't want me to do better in the search engines so I get annoyed dealing with webmasters who insist on eslgo for my site's title. I'm tempted to type link:http://www.eslgold.com/ into google and e-mail all the sites that link to this guy to suggest that they link to my site and delete the link to his.

Another thing I realized is that graphic links don't contain any keywords. Master of the obvious eh? On my site, I have a graphic header and drop down menus for a footer, and in the end my 250 pages of internal links don't help me out with key words at all. The header has to stay, but my footer will be redesigned to consist of keyword rich text links.

This is an update on my first ever post about search engine page ranking. As of today, I'm back up to #10 for speaking activities on Google and #9 on Yahoo. I'm talking about my ESL speaking activities page.

What did I do? Well I added "speaking activities" o the page a few times, but I don't think that's what changed things because the cached version is still the old version (without the added "speaking activities").

I think the difference is that I read somewhere (maybe search engine watch) that search engines partially base their rankings on whether visitors to a site return to the search engine. If they don't return, they found what they wanted and the page must be good; its ranking goes up. If they do return, they didn't find anything good; the page is bad, the ranking goes down.

Anyway, I clicked on my site from #14 and never returned to the search engine every day for about a week. I can't be sure that's what helped (and I only did that from Google, not from Yahoo). I mean maybe the competition lost some page rank or something, but there's certainly a chance it helped. Time for more experimenting...

My Google page rank for ESL go - English as second language learning and teaching recently dropped from 6 to 5 despite the fact that I've gotten many more sites to link to me and added many more pages (all of which link back to the home page).

I did a search for link:http://www.eslgo.com and it came up with 33 sites (used to come back with 49), and all but three or four of the sites are pages of ESL go. All the web returns 277, including ones that google should really know about like this page rank 5 CALL page and this list of English classes (page rank 5).

I can only include that it takes Google a long time to figure out who links to who. The second page rank 5 link I mentioned has been active for months now.

More about the ESL go speaking activities page. I've been told on these great web design forums that the page rank indicator on the Google task bar is based only on links to/from a page. I'm still a bit confused because I don't think there had been any external links to that page, and none of the internal links have changed.

I've noticed that most of my main pages, ESL resources for example, have a page rank of 5 (again due to internal linking rather than links from external sites). The pages they link to (except for the newly created) have a rank of 4.

By the way, I just checked the page rank for the ESL go speaking activities page. again; it was four. So I checked the search for speaking activities. Down to #16. I checked the page rank again. "Current page is not ranked by Google."

Is this the famed Google Dance at work? Maybe, I checked again and it's back to 4...

ESL go.com's speaking activities used to have a page rank of 4 and was number 5 in Yahoo and Google search results. Now it's number 12 in Google and 10 in Yahoo, so I checked the page rank. My Google task bar says the page is not ranked. I didn't do anything to get it unranked, so I keep wondering if a competitor can somehow hurt my page rank. For example, you know those rumors about how submitting to FFA link pages can hurt your page rank? If that's true, your competitors can sign up your site for all those nasty FFA sites (thereby hurting your page rank). That's why I hope it's not true that a link from a FFA page to your site hurts the site's page rank.