I am stumped and starting to worry. I need to help with my website and am funding this $100 contest for that purpose. The cool part of this contest is that: 1) We can all pool our knowledge about Google and their PR practices. 2) The members of the forum decide who wins. FIRST PRIZE - $50 SECOND PRIZE - $30 THIRD PRIZE - $20 The contest is simply for the most relevant posts in how Google PR works in relationship to the below. This contest will run until Sunday night at midnite CST and the votes will be at the end. Voting is open to any forum member. Anyone entering the contest must vote to win and you can not vote for yourself. I will post a reply that the posting is over and the voting is open and will PM all entrants so they can vote. Voting will be for 24 hours. Winners will be posted Monday at midnite and they will be PM'd for their PayPal email. Sorry, PayPal only for the winners. Here is the skinny: 6 year old site Hundreds of #1 and first page rankings in google (poker dvd & poker chip case are 2 of them) Over 8000 pages in the site eCommerce site plus advice, articles, news all with affiliate marketing A Google search for site:http://(thedomainname).com shows 6900 results with no pages in supplemental results A Google search for site:http://WWW.(thedomainname).com shows 950 results with MOST of the pages in supplemental results. The site has had a home page PR of 5 for over 5 years with many interior PR5/4/3 pages and sub-domains with PR4. 10 days ago in the Google PR update the site PR went to 2 and the actual home page and all interior pages went to PRzero and have stayed there. One new sub-domain went from a PRzero to a PR4. Traffic for the last 2 days has been ABOVE NORMAL by about 20%. This could be due to a few factors (newsletter emailing, new linking strategy, new content that has been spydered, heavy affiliate traffic). Ranking report shows no measurable loss in SERP for our major search terms Google shows 271 links to the site. THE QUESTIONS - WHY did the site go to a PR2, all interior pages to PRzero, the one sub-domain go up in PR and the others stay the same? SHOULD we be worried since the Google PR update seems to be over? WHAT can be done to rectify the situation as the site has advertising agreements based on page PR? WHY the difference in the 2 site searches (www and no www) with only www showing supplemental results? If you have to ask for the site URL, then I don't think you can win. There is plenty of information to find it. Remember, 3 best posts as to the problem and cure win. If you have a question, post it here, do not PM me please. Additional Info I am the site owner, not a SEO contractor We have over 20,000 positive feedback on eBay so my word is pretty good on payment even though I don't have many iTrader points here.
Perhaps you lost a high PR link to your site, such as a PR7/8, that was holding up most of your PR, or that site lost PR, or that site's links were devalued. The PR update seems to be over, so there's not much you can do now, except either buying links, or finding related content willing to link to you, but these won't affect you for 4+ months in terms of PR. If you have not lost in standings in Google search rankings, then there really shouldn't be a problem. I don't recommend buying links based on PR, because it changes, and it is often better for your site to find a more related site to link to you, then one with just high PR. As far as the www vs. without www, that can happen if most of the links to you are without the www in the href of the anchor tag. Currently I have 38,400 pages indexed with www on site: search, and 31,100 without the www for my site. Overall I wouldn't worry about the www vs. non-www, as long as one of the two is indexed, it will appear in google searches. Hope this info helps you out, I'm not an expert though.
WHY did the site go to a PR2, all interior pages to PRzero, the one sub-domain go up in PR and the others stay the same? - Honestly, it's hard to predict why as we don't have the url. But basically, your pr depends on how many sites are linking you, important sites (high pr) give your pr a boost and especially if the subjects of those pages are about equall so for it going down at 2, you've lost some great links. For your subdomains, if you haven't purchased any link, a content from it might have catched someone's attention with high pr. SHOULD we be worried since the Google PR update seems to be over? Nuh, personally for me NOT. PR are just numbers from the ones in googleplex behind those googledesks. As long as my site can be searched and my earnings are still there no matter what pr it has, I'd be happy. "If you can't be searched, you don't exist." WHAT can be done to rectify the situation as the site has advertising agreements based on page PR? Be honest to your advertisers. Give something that will cover the recent pr loss like for example, if you only give them a link at your homepage, make it sitewide. WHY the difference in the 2 site searches (www and no www) with only www showing supplemental results? Most links given to you comes with www, that's it and no more. You should have done some url rewriting for your site. This will consolidate all the inbound links regardless of whether or not they use the "www.". This is in theory supposed to boost up your Google PageRank by having only one domain, instead of two. Try this at your .htaccess RewriteEngine on #Redirect http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,L] PHP: P.S. Just giving my try to shoot that prize
I think that TBPR, thats the visible little green bar , is extracted from the internal google pr working, and its based on incoming links according to google literature. Your say nothing about incoming links to the site. If the links are discontinued by the linker. If The sites linking to you have been down graded by google. If you perhaps had 1 or 2 really high ranking sites linking to your site who have stopped linking to you, For potential reasons for loss or TBPR, use the yahoo link checker to investigate your incoming links, navigate to the first few on the list to see what the TBPR on those pages are. It might give you an indication, no one knows extactly, only Googles algorithin knows.
thanks, you are in the running. Google shows 271 incoming links. Also, this does not address the przero of the interior pages.
Not all your subs went to zero, I'm seeing a 3 on the DVD page. I can understand why you are stumped, there's not a lot of logic there. My first thought was someone has botched an attempt at Google bowling, but I couldn't see a pile of trashy incoming links in your SERPs. Next question: why would Google punish a site that otherwise is doing well and is legit? Duplicate content is my suggestion, it's the only thing I could find on the site without pulling apart the backend code. You're running "news" stories that appear to be press releases from online gaming firms etc, and fairly regularly so a lot of your newer pages are going to be these. I'm not sure if you're changing them/ rewritting them, but certainly atleast with the few I looked it, it didn't appear that way. I'd suggest that you stop reposting these news items verbatim, re-write them prior to posting, maybe switch it to first person then quote where required. Also the spammy looking links at the bottom of the site may also have raised a flag with Google, I can't say it's a factor 100% but Matt Cutt's has written in the past about selling links like these and how Google will and does take action when it finds them...not saying that you're selling them, and even if you are so be it, but if you're committed to getting your PR back lose the bottom outward links. Recip/ sold links are always better hidden in the sidebar, at least that way they look like they're there for reasons other than SEO. Hope this helps.
My take would be Google views a site with www and one without www differently. So if more sites link to you without a www then it ranks higher without supplementals. To correct this you will need to ensure that all your links point to the same url format. Otherwise you can setup a permanent redirect so that all requests to urls without www are redirected to an url with www. You will also need to look at whether you link to your inner pages from other pages on your site. This could be the reason why one of your sub domain is doing well. Sites linking to you could have lost PR, thereby affecting your overall popularity. Should you be worried that the PR update is over and also since you already have agreements withg existing advertisers? No and yes. There is not much you can do about the update already over. Prepare for the next one. Get more links to your site. If possible get links from very established reputed sites. If you have to buy links, you can try up coming sites which may currently be of low PR but by the time of the next update will be very valuable. I am not sure what you would have told your advertisers but if you have guaranteed PR for the next year, that is unfortunate (and not very wise). There is no way you can guarantee PR (traffic yes, PR no). As majorkontrapelo said you could offer a site wide or another link on some other site to make up for the deficit in agreement. To prevent a similar situation in future I think you must change your agreement from being PR centric to traffic based.
good posts @nnet and @iwm1979. You are in the running for the contest. Ends tonight at midnight. Any others?
The contest is over. Time to vote. If you entered, you can not vote for yourself. If not, you can vote for anyone. Winner will be announced tomorrow night.
Thanks majorkontrapelo. I have already sent my vote to Megadeals by PM. I think this is going to be quite interesting.