This is very disappointing for me. I was pleased with the pagerank of 2 don't get me wrong but now after all the linkbuilding and trying to set the site out so its more user friendly, they drop me down to a feeble PR 1! What really takes the buscuit is that my other site (The Green Age) has not had much effort with regard to linkbuilding or content recently and that pagerank has stayed the same, even some deeper pages picking up a PR 1. I cannot see any links that have been dropped to justify the PR drop. What has gone wrong? Google you fickle little creature! Its's great when all the work pays off eh?! The site is in my sig (funny pictures) if anyone cares to take a look and suggest any possible reasons. Cheers.
http://whois.domaintools.com/strangenature.com Click on the 'text browser' on the left hand side, it'll give you tips on how to increase your SEO Score... The things that it says are: Hope those help!
If you "farm" unnatural links using directory submissions, article submissions, blog posting, forum signatures, etc. expect this to always be the case. These methods of gaining inbound links provide a nice initial boost, but usually within a month or so they lose their punch. So they require that you constantly continue building links just to maintain your current PR and rankings. SEO Strategy: "Farmed"/Unnatural Links are Tactical (Short-Term)/ Natural Links are Strategic (Long-Term): For example, when you first submit an article to an article submission site with a link pointing to some page on your site that you are trying to get to rank, the article typically lives deep in the submission site's web/linking structure (like deep in the archives). But they typically will also highlight it on a "New <insert topic> Articles" page. This "New <insert topic> Articles" is almost guaranteed to be indexed and typically carries a decent amount of PR as it typically has a decent number of inbound links and is close to the submission site's home page. As long as your article is being highlighted there, life is good because you are getting a nice boost for the "New <insert topic> Articles" page. At some point however your article will fall off of the "New <insert topic> Articles" list and will only be accessible via the archive pages which are deep in the site's folder/linking structure. You've lost your most powerful link ("New <insert topic> Articles" page) so there is this domino effect that occurs. The amount of PR being passed to your article page is MUCH less without the "New <insert topic> Articles" linking to it... which means the amount of PR that gets passed from the article to the URL on your site that you are trying to get to rank is much less... which means your URL on your site has less PR it can pass to your home page. Sometimes if your submitted article did not gain any anybound links from sites external to the submission site while it was being hightlighted on the "New <insert topic> Articles" page, after a brief period in the archive Google will see it as not worth taking up space in its index and deindex it. If your article is no longer in the index, it cannot pass your URL that you were trying to get to rank ANY PR. The link does not even exist as far as the engines are concerned. A similar phenomenon occurs on Blogs - both with posts that link to your URLs and FOLLOWed comments which link to your URLs. When another site writes a post and links to your URL, it's typically highlighted on and linked to from their home page as well as one or more category pages and the monthly archive page. Not only do you have a link from the post page itself to your URL, but you typically also have a link from that blog's home page to your URL if enough of the article is displayed to include the link to your URL embedded in the post. Since the post page has inbound links from the blog's home page,category page(s), and archive page, it's being passed a decent amount of PR which it can pass on to your URL. Once the post moves off of the home page, it's only being linked to now only from the category page(s) and archive page. Again, it's lost its strongest inbound link - the home page link. So there is less PR to pass along to your URL. When you comment on blogs which allow FOLLOWed links, while the post you comment on is highlighted on the blog's home page you will get a decent boost. But as soon as the post you commented on drops off the blogs home page, it has typically lost the link from the blog's home page and will therefore have less PR to pass along to your page. Same thing happens with forum signature links... So as you can see, if you "farm" your links unnaturally then in order to simply "maintain" the same PR that you have today requires you to continue to "farm" more and more links. This is the fundamental problem with "farming" links IMO. It's a short-term strategy with long-term diminishing returns. This phenomenon does not typically occur w/ links obtained naturally. Those links where other traditional types of sites (normal web sites - not blogs, submission sites, forums, directories) link to you tend to provide a steady flow of PR over time and if anything grow as the URL that links to you gains inbound links. Also, sources of "farmed" unnatural links are often the target of Google algorithm changes since these are typically the types of links that spammers are using to farm links. Natural inbound links are rarely affected by anti-spam algorithm changes. Moral of the story is... If you want to grow links fast, "farming" and buying paid links is really your only real option. But do so knowing that they provide a short lived boost and require continued link building efforts just to maintain the same PR and rankings. Know also that you could take huge hits in PR and rankings as Google tweaks its algorithm to combat spammers who are taking advantage of these same unnatural link building techniques. If, however, you are patient and grow links naturally by waiting on other traditional sites to link to you of their own freewill (or because you convinced them that doing so would benefit their site visitors), it will take a lot longer - typically a year or two - before you possibly start ranking decently for any keyword phrases. But the benefits you gain from patience are 1) links that don't typically diminish in value and 2) links that are rarely affected by anti-spam changes to Google's algorithm. The choice is yours. It all depends on how much time you can wait to grow your rankings and how much resources and time you have for building links.
Thanks for both of your replies. From the looks of it I have some work to do with the loading time - over 100kb. As blatent as it is, I have never thought about link building like that either. That explanation sounds like the reason why the rank dropped. At the moment I am trying to build a few links every 2-3 days through blog commenting and article submissions, in the hope that through better rankings achieve natural links. Just a bit annoying to be cut at the first hurdle! Not that PR matters as I keep hearing everywhere. cheers.
Yep. Don't worry about PR so much. I would worry more about rankings and traffic. If you go from PR6 to PR0 like several of my pages did in March but your rankings and traffic remain constant as mine did, life is still good. By the way, when "farming" links, try to mix up your link buiding techniques. Use as many different ones as you can - blog commenting, blog posting, article submission, directory submissions, forum signatures, etc. That way if Google changes their algorithm to target one of those techniques, you don't take a huge hit. It's like diversifying your stock portfolio. Of all the ways to "farm" links, I do, however, think that article submission provides the best types of links. Something else that works well... Don't just build links from other sites to your URLs. If you submit an article pointing to a URL on your site, then add a signature link on these forums occasionally (ideally changing the link text every few posts) pointing to the article you submitted. Or if you add a second article with a link pointing to that same URL on your site, add an additional link on the second article pointing back to the first article and/or post a link to the first and/or second article in blog comments or blog posts. So "farm" links to the post/comments/articles that are in turn pointing to URLs on your site. Farm links for your farmed links. This will give them more PR to pass to your site AND help insure that those posts/comments/articles remain indexed.
I just saw my own pr drop while my ranking and traffic are only increasing. I dont know what gives, but i was only up for about a month or so until i dropped back down. Very frustrating.
The PR for one my blog drop from PR 3 to 2 as well. I am reverting my blog to a better template, as I am suspecting that could be one of the factor that is causing my PR reduction. Sigh....effort wasted
I've also experienced that before, when my blog drop its pr since when I stop optimizing, promoting and updating so you better not stop what you are doing right now for your site.
look, you can't put much emphasis on pagerank. instead judge your success on your traffic. has this improved? i'm guessing that if you've put any effort in it will have. ignore google pagerank!
wow many suggestions.. the reason may be quite simple some of the links you have built might have expired try building more links u might actually get there..
Few steps to take - 1. Write Good Genuine Articles Everyday 2. Build new dofollow links with high PR 3. Get active on Digital Point I think this will do to get your PR back for sure.
Don't worry about that...Write Good content avoid copy content, you can submit your website link to high PR directories, Social Bookmarking ect., Build and get Quality back link... This will do to get your PR back for sure.
Just because, you are buying links or exchanging links etc, doesn't mean your PR will go higher. You should check google link policy again. Some of the methods can be caught and you could also get penalised for it. Usually, PR will go higher, if your links are build naturally. That means, without you asking or paying someone to link to your site. Also, the relavancy of the sites, where your links are displayed. Are all those sites related to yours? As long as you keep providing good content on your website or blog, people will link. Also, try wrtting articles for other blogs. This is more useful tan buying links from other sites. Good luck for the next time.
Thanks again for the replys. A few ideas for me to think about. As for google policies, I am playing by the rules. No bought links, no spam tools etc. As much as I have been trying to gain revevant links, a few are from seo sites like this one. Some are from social networking and I am trying to get links from hubpages. The other links are from blogs in the relevant niche. One thing I have done recently is change the template. The old one had a few extra internal links. Would google see this as a drop in good site navigation? From what I am hearing, the drop in PR is down to links loosing their juice and it's just a case of working on keeping them to the niche. cheers