page rank 0 penalty

Question

I have a wordpress blog and a www-website on the same domain for about one year. Together it is about 170 pages. The page rank is still 0. I understand that page rank 0 is a penalty for duplicate content. The pages are indexed in google but still no page rank.

In google webmaster tools there is no indication for any problem. I asked for reconsideration of both blog and website a month ago. Google accepted the reconsideration but it did not change anything.

Other pages of similar size and similar audience earn PR 4-6. Is there something I can do in order to get a fair page rank?

A coworker told me that it might be the case that a link farm is using the content and I can do nothing about it. Is there a reliable way to check for something like that?

I do not like to give up so quickly is there a chance to fix this by for example moving to another domain?

Answer 1

First and foremost what you see in the toolbar is not your real PR. It is a rounded number that represents a snap shot from some unknown point in the past. So it cannot be considered reliable or accurate.

Secondly, how do your pages rank? If they're indexed they can potentially rank well despite whatever the toolbar says your PR is. PR is just one of about 200+ ranking factors and most likely a small one at that. So if your pages are indexed a low PR won't stop them from ranking well.

Thirdly, PR is all about links. Period. Not content nor size nor topic. Links. Do you have any links pointing to your pages? Do they have decent PR? Are they nofollow? Do they have good PR themselves?

Fourthly (is that even a word?), PR is per page, not per site. So your home page has a PR of zero, not your whole website (although your inner pages may also have a PR of zero but that's considered separately and not as a group).

Link farms stealing your content may hurt your potential to be either indexed or rank well but won't affect your PR. If you published that content first then you should (theoretically) be included in the Google's index and they should not. Google has been cracking down on this lately, along with poor content, so if you are having issues with this and are the original author you need to sit tight while it gets sorted out by Google. But this still won't affect your PR.

Your job is to get some links to point to your home page ideally from related sites that rank well for your term (not only for PR but for ranking purposes). Start with links in directories related to your site and go from there. Those links will be low value but can represent a beginning of your efforts to improve your PR.