Dear Kalena…
Having just bribed you with a coffee, I have a question which might be interesting to other readers. Say a web site has 500 words of text. Would the site have a higher Google PageRank if all the text was on one page (using scroll bars) as opposed to spreading over 5 pages?
For example the home page of the Oz site (http://www.lowercall.com.au/index.html) is currently spread over 4 web pages. The latter pages do not have any PageRank whereas the first page does. Is there any reason why we should not put all the text on one page and use a scroll bar?
Kind regards
Mike
Kalena’s Answer:
Dear Mike
Thanks for the coffee top-up, I really need it this week! Let me make some comments on your situation:
1) I seriously hope your entire site contains more than 500 words of text. For pages to do well in the search engines, they usually require around 250-300 words of text each, as a minimum. In my experience, a web site with less than five text-heavy pages does not perform well in search engines.
2) I’m assuming you are looking at the green bar PageRank in the Google Toolbar? Let’s just get one thing straight here. That little green bar is NOT a true indication of your site’s Google PageRank. That figure is known only to Google. It’s not even a close approximation these days, because it is only updated when the Toolbar software is updated and by then your site’s true PageRank score has changed dramatically anyway. So it’s always out of date. You shouldn’t be looking at that green bar at all.
3) Generally, a page with more text on it will perform better than a short page with very little text. This is because a page with more text provides more information to search engines about your site. It also generally contains more keywords and keyword phrases so it can be compared to search queries and found to be a more relevant match to a wider range of search queries. But the PageRank of a page is not dependent on the amount of text on that page, it is dependent on a wide number of on-page and off-page factors, only some of which are within your control.
4) In my opinion, you should concentrate on fleshing out the pages of your site dramatically. The site is not performing well in search engines because there is so little content available to visitors and bots. The site is also not very search engine compatible in terms of navigation and tag optimization. You should implement text links to make it easier for search robots to find and index all your pages and you should have an SEO expert review your Title Tags, META Tags and visible copy.
