There are a number of ways to assess your site’s page ranking in order to try to improve it so you can get more free traffic to your site. Free traffic, commonly referred to as organic traffic, is the life blood of any online business.
There are several tools that can help you discover your page rank. Some will even help you improve your rank by making suggestions. Let’s start with a couple of easy ones and then move on to the most complicated.
Page Rank Checker
This is a quick and easy site with no frills. Just enter your URL and it will tell you your rank, from 0 to 10.
Link – https://www.prchecker.info
Check Page Rank
This is a really handy tool that gives you a lot more data than just page rank. It shows Alexa rank, the number of back links and more. If you want a bird’s eye view of what your site looks like on the internet, this is a good place to start. Enter your URL, put the security code in the Captcha box, and scroll down to see all your results.
Link – http://checkpagerank.net/index.php
The Penalty Checker
This is a useful tool to help determine whether or not your site has run afoul of Google and has any issue. It checks three things:
* Deindexed – whether or not your site has been de-listed, or banned
* Penalized – your site appears, but none of your pages appear in Google, either because it has triggered something in the algorithm, or a Google quality engineer has decided to penalize you
* Sandboxed – You have not incurred either of the two penalties, but for some reason, you are not getting any significant amounts of traffic.
What can you do in these instances? Head to Google to try to sort them out.
Link – http://pixelgroove.com/serp/sandbox_checker/
The Google Search Console
This used to be known as Google Webmaster Tools, and as the old name suggests, it is for anyone who administers a website and wants to see how Google sees your site.
Link – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
You can get free access if you have a free Gmail account. Next, you need to verify your URL by adding a small piece of code to your site. Once you do this, you will start getting site reports.
As you can imagine, there is a lot of data under the hood that you should take the time to become familiar with. But if your page rank is low and you have been penalized, your priority will be to rescue your site.
First, click the Google Index tab to see how many of your pages have been indexed. You should have a pretty good idea of how many there are, so that total should be as close as possible to the actual number.
If it isn’t, click the Blocked Resources tab to see if anything has been penalized. If it has, click on the tab to help you understand the report and follow the instructions on how to get your page/s unblocked.
Next, check the Crawl tab. It will show you what Google sees when it sends out the search engine spiders to assess your site. If there are any errors, try to fix them, such as 404 page not found errors.
Finally, click Fetch as Google. Click Fetch and Render for Desktop, then toggle to Mobile and click again. Do this once you have made all the changes again and it should start to see your URL and all your linked pages.
If you are using a Sitemap, click on that link to test yours and add it. If you are not, create one, then upload it to your site and submit it. If you are using WordPress, use the Google XML sitemap plugin. If you are running any other kind of site, use this free tool and follow the instructions to add it to your Google account: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Use these tools and watch your rank improve.
