: Many Stack Overflow users' pages have no Google PageRank and they are not indexed, why? If you go to my user page on Stack Overflow and you check it with the Google Toolbar, you can see
If you go to my user page on Stack Overflow and you check it with the Google Toolbar, you can see it has no PageRank at all (this does happen for almost any user page, even people with much higher reputation, the only exceptions seem to be the users in page 1, and some other users they have PR).
My user page's Page Rank is not only zero, but not calculated at all. When PR is 0 or less than 1, but calculated the Google bar shows white, but when the PR is not even calculated like in my user page the Google bar shows in grey.
I further more discovered that my user page is NOT EVEN INDEXED on Google, simple test is searching on Google for the exact page url: "https://stackoverflow.com/users/260080/marco-demaio" and you will see no result.
The question is how can this be???
This is really weird to me because of the following reason:
If you search on Google for "Marco Demaio" on Stack Overflow only (you can do this by searching "site:stackoverflow.com Marco Demaio") the search result shows hundreds of 'asking/answering questions' pages where I was 'tagged'!!! Let's check one of these: the 1st one that appears now (shows one of the question I asked).
We can be sure this page is indexed in Google because comes out in a search. Moreover, its PR is calculated. It's probably nearly zero. Still, some PR flows there, the PR bar is not grey, but white:
The page shown above has got links to my own user page. I checked the source code of the page shown above and the links are not hidden or set with a rel="nofollow", moreover I can't see any meta character excluding the links on the page from being followed.
So what's happening? Why Google does not see my user page at all.
Did Stack Overflow do something to achieve this? If yes what did they do?
Any explanation really appreciates (as always).
P.S. obviously I checked also the code of my user page, but I could not find meta tags excluding Google search for the page.
P.S. 2 in a desperate adventure I also checked Stack Overflow's robots.txt but it does not seem to exclude user pages.
UPDATE 1
following up on some answers, I did some more research. Excluding for a while the PR problem (since PR is not science), and looking only at the user page on Stack Overflow NOT BEING INDEXED problem: pages do not seem to be indexed by Google because of the user reputation, this user for instance has got NOW 200 points less reputation than me and his page is indexed (while mine not).
It does not seem even to be connected with months you have been on Stack Overflow, this user (almost my same reputation) has been there for 3 months only and his page is indexed (while mine not and I have been a user for 7 months).
It's bizarre!
UPDATE February/2011
As of today, the page got indexed by Google at least when you search for "site:stackoverflow.com Marco Demaio" it's the 1st page.
The amazing thing is that it has still got NO PageRank at all: Google toolbar states loud and clear "No PageRank information available".
It's odd!
More posts by @Lee4591628
3 Comments
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Marco: Your user page only has 5 words on it (really only 4 since "a" is a stop word) the rest is an autogenerated user page. If your goal is to organize the world's information, how useful is such a page?
I checked several of the "page one" users and all had added a significant amount of information to their user pages, as did the other example you gave. Perhaps you should add a few paragraphs about yourself? Without that, your user page is nothing but a page full of (mostly) internal links.
If a page is not indexed (as your user page is not) or newly indexed then it will not have a PageRank assigned to it. Some online services like prchecker.info give you "N/A" as the value. It looks like the PR toolbar just shows blank instead of showing you the N/A or an error.
As for why the pages are not indexed it's difficult to know exactly but I'd hazard a guess that either they are not listed in SO's sitemap, or they are given a very low priority compared to the actual questions. Since so many questions are asked daily Googlebot is concerning the majority of its time with those instead of the user pages.
With your rep of 1,225 you are ranked something like 8,000th in the user list so are fairly low priority in Googlebot's eyes.
Jon Skeet has PR4, by the way ;)
EDIT based on comments: No, Google's indexing of a page will not depend directly on their "reputation" since of course a web search algorithm has no concept of Stack Overflow rankings.
However, users with a higher rep on SO will inevitably have asked/answered more questions, so there will be more links to their profile page, giving Googlebot more inclination to check out their user page and possibly index it.
So a user with roughly the same rep may have more questions/answers, or asked/answered more popular questions. Or the user page could have more links to it from other sources (e.g. their personal blog).
In short, there are many, many factors why one user page may be indexed and another not.
My StackOverflow profile page is indexed.
The Google toolbar does not update PR as often as Google does internally. The PR you see in the toolbar is stale and usually months old. Pages that you see with no PR or zero PR probably have more PR then that. You just don't know it yet because Google hasn't pushed that info out to the toolbar yet.
As far as indexing profile pages, those pages typically have low PR and low relevance for anything other then a user's name. They probably are of low priority for Google to index and, if they do, may push them to their supplemental index or do other things with them we are not aware of.
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