did Google penalize me for trying to improve my site?

[ireneherz]

I have a website, Set Up Your Own Website, that's been up for about two years. For some time, the home page was a PR 5. Recently, I got what I thought was some good advice from Hedir. I cleaned up dead links, validated all the code with W3C, reduced the number of ads and outgoing links in general, and rewrote the content to be better organized and more informative. Now, boom! It's dropped to a PR 4! What am I doing wrong??

[Feydakin]

PR is a moving beast.. Having a PR5 today doesn't mean it will always be a PR5.. As I understand it PR is a finite number spread across all the web pages.. As one gains there must be a looser somewhere else to maintain the balance..

Since PR is based solely on links I don't see how any on page changes could have affected that anyway..

[glengara]

*I have a website, Set Up Your Own Website*

Site seems to have been hit with a duplicate content filter, probably due to www.setupawebsite.info.

[greeneagle]

How many sites with the same content are there?
How many total redirected domains?
How are the redirects handled?

Ken

[ireneherz]

I made a misguided attempt to improve my search engine position by mirroring the site. Should I just drop the alternate url? If I park the other URL on godaddy and have them do a redirect (since I started building links), will Google still hate me?

[Feydakin]

Most deifinatly yes..

[ireneherz]

Okay. No redirect.

The idea was, I was going to transition over to the new URL, but it just never worked out. Anyone wanna buy a domain name cheap? :-)

BTW, I've noticed my back links are way down from their all time high for the original URL (tool is conveniently on my site) so not only didn't the mirroring work, it backfired because I spread my link building efforts too thin.