PageRank dropped - Thoughts?

Discussion in 'SEO' started by adarshry, Mar 3, 2008.

  1. #1
    Hi all,

    Yet another PageRank thread, but this ones actually seeking a few thoughts.

    We had a homepage PR of 5 from the last update which has now dropped to 3 on Friday. Also, we have lost PR on all of our internal pages where we had PR ranging from 3-4 for the last one year. We haven't bought any paid links and we have got most of our links from association with related sites within the industry, blogging, articles, etc. We also have good clean links from big Newspaper websites and considering the effort we have put in the last few months, we expected the pagerank to rise. A bit disappointed with the drop.

    Since we are a seasonal ecommerce site, our traffic surged six fold during the busy Valentine's and Mother's day periods. Also to mention that we ran promotions with a few quality local community sites for a period of two weeks prior to Valentine's and mother's day from where we had tons of clean new links for two weeks.

    However, our SERPs are unchanged and have remained the same. Hard to understand why our internal pages are showing no PageRank at all apart from the homepage being dropped. Have we been penalised? Is there any way we could find out what went wrong?

    Any thoughts and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

    Many thanks in advance!
     
    adarshry, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  2. mridout196

    mridout196 Banned

    Messages:
    720
    Likes Received:
    13
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #2
    I too have seen a lot of my sites drop in PR, very few increases. Traffic is the same in most cases, and actually improving in some.

    I think Google is trying to add value to PR again, as most people consider it to be a waste of time in regards to ranking a site.
     
    mridout196, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  3. dpking

    dpking Peon

    Messages:
    1,021
    Likes Received:
    16
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #3
    I will suggest you to wait !! It might be some kind of update .. something going on thr ... so better wait till google officially announce the PR updates !!
     
    dpking, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  4. adarshry

    adarshry Peon

    Messages:
    169
    Likes Received:
    2
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #4
    Thanks Mridou196 and DPKing. Just wondering if we have instances like these before. Its been over two days since our PR dropped. What's hard to explain is the drop in PR of all the internal pages including the blog which has incoming links with great quality and high PR.
     
    adarshry, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  5. bobchrist

    bobchrist Active Member

    Messages:
    4,102
    Likes Received:
    95
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    88
    #5
    Your incoming links might have been discounted for whatever reason, there could be possibility that your link partners might be involved in link farm or on bad neighborhood. Also check whether you update your content regularly? If you're using sitemap stop using it.
     
    bobchrist, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  6. zinruss

    zinruss Notable Member

    Messages:
    3,288
    Likes Received:
    237
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    270
    #6
    Pagerank is one of the methods google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the google listing. In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. I agreed with bob and believe that your link partners might be involved in link farm.
     
    zinruss, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  7. adarshry

    adarshry Peon

    Messages:
    169
    Likes Received:
    2
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #7
    Thanks Bob, Zinruss. Is there any way I could find out what links are affecting us? Not sure what you mean by stop using sitemap. Is it a bad idea to use Google Sitemaps? Also hundreds of our internal pages have lost rank. In fact none of the internal pages have PR anymore. Was wondering what could be the reason.
     
    adarshry, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  8. shyboy

    shyboy Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    682
    Likes Received:
    26
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    150
    #8
    adarshry, just wanted to say that you have a great site there, i especially liked the blog. We also run a uk business (Faraway Furniture) and i am very impressed with the amount of publicity you managed to get in such a short time. Well done!
     
    shyboy, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  9. adarshry

    adarshry Peon

    Messages:
    169
    Likes Received:
    2
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #9
    Thanks ShyBoy!
     
    adarshry, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  10. nab82ba

    nab82ba Guest

    Messages:
    23
    Likes Received:
    0
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #10
    Some of your incoming links may have "nofollow" tags which would not pass any PR onto your site. But as long as your SERPs are unchanged i dont see the problem in a PR drop, after all its not how high your PR that is the most important factor.
     
    nab82ba, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  11. bobchrist

    bobchrist Active Member

    Messages:
    4,102
    Likes Received:
    95
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    88
    #11
    IMO, most of the time use of sitemap are redundant and one of the downside of XML sitemaps- it's more likely prone for scraping vulnerability. In my personal view even a very small fault is going to be exposed and noticed by search engine, if you often submit your site using sitemap.

    you may refer this article that seems covered many points that I would like to elaborate; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/expert-advice-on-google-sitemaps-verify-but-dont-submit
     
    bobchrist, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  12. allout

    allout Prominent Member

    Messages:
    5,000
    Likes Received:
    461
    Best Answers:
    2
    Trophy Points:
    340
    #12
    If you have a commerce site, does it really matter? PR is mainly important of you are planning to sell links. The SERPs and traffic is what you should care about. PR changes when you lose back links, the back links lose PR, or Google discounts the back links for other reasons. You should worry about quality links that get you traffic and ignore PR.
     
    allout, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  13. angilina

    angilina Notable Member

    Messages:
    7,824
    Likes Received:
    186
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    260
    #13
    One of my sites dropped to PR0 :(
     
    angilina, Mar 5, 2008 IP
  14. adarshry

    adarshry Peon

    Messages:
    169
    Likes Received:
    2
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #14
    whats an infraction, I got a message from DP today saying I have got an infraction
     
    adarshry, Mar 6, 2008 IP
  15. Deadsquirrel

    Deadsquirrel Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    194
    Likes Received:
    27
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    120
    #15
    an infraction is just that. Its a slap on the wrist and a first warning about something which is wrong on your site. Can you elaborate on what the infraction said excactly as it might help us give you better advice.

    by the way, i will just like to shadow ShyBoy's words and say what a nice site and some expert marketing there. well done.
     
    Deadsquirrel, Mar 6, 2008 IP
  16. SAMUELJEDEN

    SAMUELJEDEN Peon

    Messages:
    46
    Likes Received:
    1
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #16
    We are going off topic here. Can we stay on topic. And your pagerank may have changed because of several actions. Like above your backlinks may have been "disallowed". Personally i dont think google pagerank makes any difference.

    SAMUELJEDEN
     
    SAMUELJEDEN, Mar 6, 2008 IP
  17. adarshry

    adarshry Peon

    Messages:
    169
    Likes Received:
    2
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #17
    Oh..i get it now, my post has been moved from Google to SEO. Thanks dead squirrel for the comments. With regard to our PageRank being dropped, whats annoying is we've lost PR on all of our internal pages. We've been racking our brains to find a reason, when most of these pages have good inbound links. A good example is our blog. We have a good number of subscribers and plenty of quality incoming links. Same applies to most of our internal pages. It'll be great if we can pinpoint the exact reason for this. Suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
     
    adarshry, Mar 6, 2008 IP
  18. adarshry

    adarshry Peon

    Messages:
    169
    Likes Received:
    2
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #18
    Also, just wondering what DP members think of Google Directory pagerank as we are listed right on top along with other sites in the industry. The Google Directory PR seems to show us a PR6.
     
    adarshry, Mar 6, 2008 IP
  19. Kneeland

    Kneeland Peon

    Messages:
    29
    Likes Received:
    0
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #19
    update your site more often and try to get your traffic back because obviously it has seemed to fade.
     
    Kneeland, Mar 7, 2008 IP