Question. One of my main site (business site) had PR3, but has PR2 now, and I had kept links in footer for two of my other related sites and both of them have PR2 now from PR0. So does your PR go down because you pass pagerank to them? Is that possible? IF so should I make those link no follow?
If page rank actually depends on the number of external links is a questions which has been debated a lot. I believe it does and you would many others who say it does not. You would also like to check if the backlinks to your websites has gone up or down. It might also happen, that your backlinks are passing less page rank juice than it did in the previous case. You should check the backlinks and keep building it to increase your pagerank.
The PageRank of a URL depends on the INBOUND links to that URL from BOTH internal AND external pages. Other links on your site linking to one of your pages passes PR just like external links do. As rashmiranjan suggested, you likely lost credit for some of your inbound links. If you use unnatural link development methods like blog commenting, forum signatures, article submission, etc. then you will typically lose credit for the inbound links that you get as a result of these methods over time as they lose links from the home page of the blog, move off of the first few pages of the forum thread list, drop off of the recent articles page, etc. Eventually, if those places where you planted a link didn't get inbound links from other sites, they often get deindexed which will also cause you to lose credit for the inbound link. Unnatural link building methods require that you continually build links JUST to maintain your status quo. If you stop building links then you can expect a drop in PR.
Exactly same thing happened to me. All my web sites linked from one main site which previously had PR5. 4 months ago main site got PR3. Last PR update it gets PR2 and all other sites linked from it got same. Will need to focus on more link building
I read something that page rank is changing based on how fast a page loads? Call me crazy but I read it on another forum.
I think Google's algo is changing and using load times, but PR is not influenced by load times but by backlinks.
The challenge, then, is getting holding of those quality, long-term links that will have your back for years to come
This is some good advice I wasn't aware of, thank your for sharing this post! I can see how this would make sense, and building links with blog commenting and forum posting doesn't last forever.
Actually guys - it said in their webmaster blog that they are not really interested in load times for the PR/value of a site. They said that the tool was there (in webmaster tools) to help webmasters. Point of fact, their tool says 99% of sites load faster than mine... BUT, I just got a 2 point PR increase... see my previous thread.
^ Will people stick around that long waiting though? One of my clients websites was 99% slower and that took >10 seconds to load up. You really don't want your users waiting that long to hit your home page!
Page load speed is the new hot topic in the SEO world but wont affect anything to do with PageRank but may have a higher weighing in the ranking algo, I have noticed 9 sites up and 5 sites down and 60 staying the same out of the sites we are responsible for, full results recorded here > http://www.delicious-webdesign.com/blog/?p=20
I believe that load time was going to only influence SERP results rather than PR. No one can say for sure what contrubutes to your PR, but it is widely believed that it is backlinks. As far as site PR's going down because of a loss of link juice, I find this hard to believe. Out of my websites, one went from 0 to 3 overnight. That site is linking to a new page of mine as well, and the page that it is linking to got a PR of 2.
I also think the pagerank is passing to the linked sites resulting in drop in PR to the linking page.Just something I noticed, dont have something concrete to tell for it, but it happened to me also. Even if you have little outgoing links the pagerank of the page I think splits between them, resulting in drop in its own PR. If somebody has concrete proof it would be interesting.
i strongly disagree, i have three sites, one with around 2000 backlinks linking to the homepage and its pr0 and the other two have around 60-65 and theyre pr1.