I had a wordpress blog that ranked pretty well for its main term. I installed Platinum SEO and noindexed the category and archive pages. (I nofollowed links to those pages types as well although I've heard that might be a waste of time if those pages are already noindexed. People seem to disagree on that.) About 10 hours later nothing was different in Google SERPs. I check again 7 more hours later and the homepage no longer ranks for only term the entire site targets. Result number #550 is a Wordpress single post page from my blog but the homepage is gone after being the best just 7 hours earlier. Why did changing nofollow and noindex do this? All that changes is the flow of PR (which should be better) and reduces the number of pages in the site. Thanks in advance for your insight.
trosquin, it doesn't matter what their url is. You can tell the problem without that.....but at least you got your 4 links for 5 seconds of typing. kard63....Reducing the number of pages in a site so much is a drastic change. Google often temporarily drops rankings after similar drastic site changes. Why would you want Google to stop indexing all of your old pages? Those old pages help you by creating many relevant internal backlinks. You might even get rankings for some of those old pages.
I have noticed big drops on some Wordpress blogs of mine. I just wonder if Google may and I repeat may be separating business blogs from traditional blogs in the truest sense of the word and hitting those being sneaky with the blogging software. This is just a very quick thought, I have not spent time on it, just came into my head.
Those pages don't get SE traffic on my site and I thought if I stopped leaking PR to them it might cause the homepage to rank better. I know many believe that PR doesn't help (I can't figure it out personally) but if PR went up it would be easier to trade links too.