Blank Pages and PR

[Jimmy]

Do you think it is possible for a blank page to have a high PR?

 

[Dean!]

Yup, Shadyx.com was PR3 when it was a blank page

 

[Jimmy]

Yup, Shadyx.com was PR3 when it was a blank page

Really? thats interesting

 

[edwardkingston]

Lol
you're the proud owner, good luck

 

[BigBigFan]

Google stopped assigning pagerank to empty pages some years ago, or so I thought. I remember seeing a wordpress blog some guy had set up but never got around to creating content on, it only had the HELLO WORLD post. He did however link to the blog from his other sites and that gave the blog a PR5, lol. Google took that away about 3 years ago.

 

[Jessi]

I don't think you can do it any more, no. There's such a high emphasis on content creation that you can't really do it without content.

You used to be able to, though!

 

[Tara]

Google stopped assigning pagerank to empty pages some years ago, or so I thought. I remember seeing a wordpress blog some guy had set up but never got around to creating content on, it only had the HELLO WORLD post. He did however link to the blog from his other sites and that gave the blog a PR5, lol. Google took that away about 3 years ago.

Once I had a brand new blog rank at the top of Google's search results. I set the blog up late a night and went to bed. When I woke up it was at the top of the SERPs. It was embarrassing because I was too tired to add content and I didn't think it would rank. That was a few years ago. I don't know if that would happen today.

 

[BigBigFan]

I miss those days! Content ranked quickly, traffic happened quickly, scrapers weren't a dime a dozen. Good times!

I haven't seen it happen recently but it might, I highly doubt it though. Google is heavily reliant on human reviews still, much more so than they admit, and I do notice spam pages floating to the top after every update until human raters and/or the spam team spot it.

 

[Tara]

Having an exact keyword match domain helped too! Despite what Google says, they used to really love WordPress. Yes, those were the days. Short-sighted marketers derailed that train.

 

[BigBigFan]

They did, and now their near sightedness is focusing on spamming social networks so perhaps it's time for the white hat amongst us to focus more on our sites than on our site's social profiles.

I really don't even want to entertain the thought of spending an hour or more daily on a social network just to promote my site, my site needs that creative time more.

 

[Tara]

It will unwise to ignore social networks. Google has placed high value on social signals. I also like the idea of getting traffic that's independent of Google.

 

[BigBigFan]

It's kinda of funny Tara but if you focus almost entirely on getting traffic from sources other than Google then Google will tend to send you more visitors too. If your site is interesting to others then Google wants to feature it too.

It makes you wonder if we've been wrong to focus on Google all these years.

 

[Tara]

Yes, it does make me wonder. But a part of me thinks it's Google plan to derail the blackhat internet marketers. My blog ranks high. My sites didn't suffer during the "corrections". They actually rose in rank.

Social networking is a pain. I consider it to be a necessary evil. Still, I have landed some great clients and made some good friends because of social networking.

 

[invisibled]

I don't think it works anymore, i haven't seen a blank page website with high page rank recently.

Maybe you can buy a high PR domain and wipe off the pages

 

[jpvonline]

it is nearly impossible to rank sites with a blank page.
Back in the day it was a simple as adding meta tags and meta descriptions and you would rank in a second!
These days google is very strict on content, without it, you won't get anywhere!
You could do what invisibled said and buy a HIGH PR domain and just wipe the content, but it will just lose its rank after a few weeks.

 

[BigBigFan]

Social networking is a pain.

I'll vouch for that. It's a pain and it's painfully slow to build up followers the hard way.

At least one good piece of link bait can bring in a surge in traffic from time to time and those pay dividends on subscriber counts too. I wonder if blank pages could rank if enough people linked to them and talked about how blank they were. I mean, someone has to rank for "blank page" right?