After Four Months Online: Two Good One Bad

Two good and one bad were happen to SearchTheWeb2.com on May 1 after it has been online for the last four months.

The first good thing is that SearchTheWeb2.com has its first Google PageRank (PR). PR of its home page has jumped from 0 to 5. Most of the pages that it links to have a PR4. Some of you may ask what is Google PageRank and why is it important? According to Google, "PageRank reflects Google's view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that Google believes are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results." PageRank has a range of 0 to 10, based on log scale in which a page with PR4 can be 10 times of importance as a page with PR3. Any page on a new website will receive a PR0 whereas Google.com/index.html has a perfect 10 PR. You can see the page's PR from a green indicator in your Internet Explorer toolbar if you have installed Google Toolbar. For Firefox users, you can use this. If you don't have the toolbar installed you can still check any page PR using one of these sites. Please, note that PR value you see on the Toolbar may be out of date or not the same as the PR which Google currently uses to rank the page in its index.

The second good thing is that SearchTheWeb2 has been selected again as one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines for the fourth time in the last four months.

Now, the bad thing is the site is expected to be under some sorts of penalty since its traffic is sharply down in the last couple of days. The keywords which the site was used to rank at the top of Google first page result, now ranks at 50 or higher. Is this the same as “the classic minus 30”? So it should be called “the minus 50 penalty” instead. The classic -30 penalty is believed to be manually applied and still is a mystery. Its penalization affects every page on the site and for every keyword.

However, one positive for Searchtheweb2.com is that a search of "searchtheweb2.com" still gives the site at the top while such a search in “the -30 penalty” would return the home page at the top of page 4 (#31).