About 3 days ago I moved many of my subpages to different file names. I made sure the content on the new page was exactly the same as the old pages. I deleted the old pages off my server, and did 301 redirects using htaccess to redirect all the links going from the old pages to the new pages. Also I changed my xml sitemap in google webmaster tools to reflect the new names of the subpages. Now only a few days later my homepage has lost its page rank even though the homepage its self wasn't changed (aside from the link URLS to the subpages). The funny thing is that my home.htm file is showing as a zero PR but its getting a white bar, my url (which just shows that file) gets a grey bar. I still hold all the keywords I did (for now at least), only the page rank is gone. Is this normal when moving large ammounts of content. Should I be worried? Should I consider restoring my site to the way it was last week?
yes, this is very common for sites that change pages. Give it some time and your PR gets back. If you are inpatient then i suggest you create some unique content and make sure google crawls it.
If you still rank well for your keywords you don't need worry. The traffic from google is important, not the pagerank value.
It used to happen when you move folders around on a site. Hold on to your keywords, that is the ultimate and your PR will return later
This happened to me at the begining of january, and has yet to resolve itself. I've also lost all rankings for keywords that I ranked high for. I'm still sitting tight, and I'm not sure what the next steps to take are!
I'd recommend updating your content, and make sure Google crawls your site as another member suggested. Also see if you're able to get some more back links out there too.
TWO of my sites have also lost its PR,its a good pr3 site but after this weekend when i checked it is now PR0 and its inner pages has no PR,i did nothing with it but still it happened.
Waiting for google to crawl the site isn't a problem as it gets crawled daily. I'm relieved to hear that some of you have seen the same thing happen with other sites when they change the file name of subpages. I know PR isn't that important but I was worried it was a sign that my site was about to be removed from search results. That would be very bad for me since I get tons of traffic form google. But as you all have said the traffic is still coming from google which points more towards a temporary change due to all the subpages I renamed. All the help is greatly appreciated.
Just one more question. Is it normal to lose page rank on a page that hasn't moved when you rename other subpages within the same domain? Because its my homepage that lost its pagerank and that was never moved or redirected.
i also lost pr of my site but its ok the important thing is that i got some good backward links and keyword ranking on google last night so if i lose pr1 its ok