Facts: Blog at TypePad: http://ProtectedStocks.blogs.com Web Site: http://www.ProtectedStocks.com By using Domain Mapping (not forwarding) I am now pointing the domain name (www.protectedstocks.com) to the blog. Now visitors at www.ProtectedStocks.com see the content that appears on my blog. In effect, I've incorporated my blog into a regular old fashioned web site. This was my goal, but..... PROBLEM: I don't know if this was a coincidence, but soon after this was finished, my PR on the web site went from 3 down to 0. I've read where "mirror sites" are penalized. Could this be the source of the PR drop or just something else?
It's not a penalty. What you've done is create a new domain that Google knows nothing about. Thus, the PR of that new domain is 0 - just as it is for any other new domain. What you need to do is correct all internal links (i.e., links from your own website or sites) to use the new domain name and then contact as many of your other backlinks as possible (directories, other sites, other blogs, forum signatures) and try to have those backlinks changed to reflect the new domain. <edit: actually, it looks like all backlinks are internal: http://www.google.com/search?q=site...ndow=1&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-35,GGLG:en&filter=0 ) I'm assuming that you can't use a redirect in this case since the original domain belongs to Typepad? (I'm not 100% sure what Typepad is but I'm assuming it's something like Blogger).