How to get Google PageRank (from the toolbar) to increase from 0?

Question

I have an issue with the Google PageRank of my site, the PR of this site is 0. I've tried many ways to increase the PR:

• I submitted the site in webmasters
• created sitemap.xml
• filled all meta tags of site
• validated and fixed all errors from w3validator

but still PR of this site is 0.

Monitoring on Google Webmaster Tools, about 1000 URLs of site are indexed and have about 1300 backlinks. What I understand is that PR0 means my site is not trusted by Google. What could be causing this?

Answer 1

First things first. I am going to assume that your site is new or less than a year old.

Often the very foundation of good SEO is ignored choosing to jump into that nitty-gritty of on-page, off-page, backlinks, and other SEO efforts that are important but of secondary importance. I will cover the foundation of SEO which all other SEO efforts rely. It is only one side of the divide. If you pay attention the list I provide below, you will find that Google will begin to love your site much faster.

Establishing a Foundation:

The very first thing that must happen is to establish a trustworthy domain. This, in part, takes time for some of the factors but must still be the first concern any site owner has. It is the foundation upon which all other SEO efforts are built upon.

Here is the list of foundational considerations for effective SEO. Please know that this was taken from a site map that I created looking directly at a Google internal presentation and documentation designed for management, a detailed pseudo schema, business rules, and so forth.

Trust Elements:

• Registrar Quality and Reputation - chose a high quality registrar
• Host Quality and Reputation - chose a high quality host
• Registrar Changes - avoid hopping around
• Host Changes - avoid hopping around
• Registration Information - complete and accurate, if private- is it trusted
• Registrant Quality - not a known spammer, blacklisted contact, or associated with low quality domains
• Registration Period - more than 1 year (preferred)
• Domain Name - not associated with payday loans and pharmaceutical sales for example, domain higher TTL times, not previously registered, not blacklisted
• TLD Quality - TLD is known for quality domains
• IP Address - not blacklisted, dedicated (preferred), not subscriber (preferred), quality provider, higher TTL times, few IP address changes over time, PTR record set
• Site Age - the longer the better
• Site Response Times - the faster the better
• Site Up-Times - the more up-time the better
• Operating System - known for vulnerabilities, safe version
• Web Server - known for vulnerabilities, safe version
• Publicly Available Services - HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, FTP, and others hosted on single server is bad, known vulnerabilities, safe versions, open dangerous ports
• Backlink Profile - good/bad, what is the ratio, what sites link to your site (automatic drop in trust with links from hacker sites and others)
• SSL Certification - a quality certification adds trust, using HTTPS
• Site Compromised - is or has the site been compromised
• Citations - quality citations especially within trusted sources
• Code Quality - pay attention to code quality
• Outbound Links - links to quality external sources (automatic drop in trust with links to hacker sites and others)
• Internal Link Structure - clear navigation and link quality, no sculpting
• Privacy Policy - does the site have one
• Contact Information - does the site provide contact information, is there location mark-up
• Child Safe - is the site child safe

Not all of these elements are strictly required of course. But these items are measured and considered in establishing an overall trust score for the site. So if your site is new, you can compensate this with creating contact mark-up that is easily found on a contact page or in the page footer. As well, you can acquire a certificate from a quality provider (optional). The point is that all of the elements must be gauged in balance to establish trustworthiness but not all of the individual scores have to be particularly high- just good enough. Strive for the best you can.

Following this, quality backlinks, search impressions and CTR, time on site, time on page, pages read, bounce rate, and other metrics will help to drive the SiteRank that Google does apply to SERP results.

Answer 2

Although there are some great answers here, there is one explanation missing, how PageRank is actually calculated.

In the simplest form, PageRank is an algorithm that is calculated on the number and quality of links that are linking to your site. The higher the PR of the sites linking to a page, the higher the PR should be. More info here: PageRank from wiki

So you could have the best optimised website, with no technical issues, every Google guidelines followed to a T, but if there are no links pointing to your site you wont have a high PR.

So yes, all the suggestions mentioned can help you achieve PR indirectly by attracting people to link to your site, but wont actually increase PR directly.

I thought I'd just mention this, as it seemed that OP wasn't sure how PR is calculated, due to the nature of his question.

Answer 3

Q: My site's PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. If you're looking for metrics, we'd encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.

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Pagerank updates only every so often (If I recall correctly, it's currently 4 times a year). So be prepared to wait.

Luckily, pagerank isn't everything. If you have a proper site, which is valuable to users(!), google will show your site in the results.

Make sure your site has proper content, something which makes users stay on your site, maybe share on socialmedia, get fresh content and keep updating your site and the value of your site will increase.

Sitemaps, W3C errors and all those other technical things are good to have, but not the deciding factor. Content, content, content. The backend should only make it easier for bots to understand the.... Content.

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If your website is older than 1/4th of a year and you still have this problem, you should try to track why there is no change. What to SEO-test sites say? Does Google webmastertools give you any hint as to why? Maybe some virus has been detected? Or malicous content was found on this domain (possibly by previous owner!).