PR5 to PR0 without any reason

[Deep13]

Hi,
I run a personal blog which was PR5 for quite sometime. But suddenly in this PR change it become PR0, the site not banned, internal pages still hold PR. But home page PR is gone. It shows around 1100 pages of the site crawled till now but the backlink count has become 0 for some reason. (It used to be around 179 earlier)

I have no idea about the reason. I tried to trace it out myself but could not find anything wrong with the blog. It is a personal blog with absolutely no scope for spamming or any black hat stuff.

I am just curious to know what made PR go down directly to 0.

I personally feel it is some kind of bug which made my PR0.

You can check my blog here.

Regards,
Deep

[MikeinFlorida]

Hi Deep: Personally I think way too many people give the PR credit. Frankly that little green light doesn't mean a whole lot and the PR typically comes and goes for a while during Google's reindexing of sites. The only people who give the PR much credit really are uninitiated advertisers and the public. Even G has said it really isn't that big a thing.

[Deep13]

Yes, I too don't value PR much but I am just curious to know what can be the reason for this sudden drop? I do not get into any kind of link building stuff or anything (ofcourse I do link to some of the friends and sites). It is just a simple blog / site.

2nd thing to worry here is, currently it shows link count dropped to 0 and I dont want google to stop indexing my pages due to this bug / issue. Because I have 75% of my traffic is from google.

Regards,
Deep

[DrK]

You are probably just getting your response from a different Google data center. This happens to some of my sites too sometimes. No big deal. Expect to see it back in a day or two.

[blitzen]

When my PR went from 4 to 0, my sales declined substantially. PR does matter, just don't use it as the only indicator.

I've been noticing web managers reporting fluctuating PR's ever since the new alog early last year.

Could this be part of G's "leveling the field"? I'm wondering whether they're now shuffling the PR for sites whenever data center updates occur. I'd have a good PR for a few months and my competition is in the toilet. Then, my plummets when my competition recovers.

Just a thought. What do you think?

[Deep13]

DrK - what my concern is, if it was just picking the different dc then it wouldnt have showed PR0 in most of the DCs.. check it here

blitzen - I can see slight change in the traffic (around 300 uniques less) but I cannot say that it is because of this reason. I will monitor the traffic closely for a week and then only I can come to any conclusion about the traffic.

Deep

[SemAdvance]

You have a canonical URL issue and as such Google has misplaced your PR

Results 1 - 10 of about 745 for whoisdeep.com/

Results 1 - 10 of about 723 for www.whoisdeep.com/

Results 1 - 2 of about 3 for http://www.whoisdeep.com

Results 1 - 1 of 1 for http://whoisdeep.com

Go to Google Webmaster tools and select the domain you want Google to use or you can use htaccess and mod rewrite rules to direct all incoming urls to the absolute URL and fix your PR issue this way.

Hope this helps.

Peace

[incrediblehelp]

I see the blog as PR5 here.

[Deep13]

SemAdvance - hmm I don't think so that can be issue. The results of site:www.whoisdeep.com and site:whoisdeep.com fetch the same amount of pages. Same applies for link: query. The search you did was just to search the strong whoisdeep.com in the pages.

incrediblehelp - check the results from Live PR checker site here

Can you also tell me what does it show when you run link: query?

[irishcaper]

My site was Ranked 5 and is now 0 as well.(www. irishcaper.com) In reading your replies, amI right that this is only temporary?

[myfreeforum]

Originally Posted by SemAdvance

You have a canonical URL issue and as such Google has misplaced your PR

Hope this helps.

Peace

I have been bitten by this a lot! My brain doesn't register the difference between www. and no www. anymore. The difference in PR can be drastic, and I am trying to stay consistent these days. :)

About PR: Actually some of my best converting and well indexed pages register 0 PR when I look at them on the toolbar. That said, I would guess that two identically optimized pages might duke it out on PR. Actually I have no way to prove this, so I'm not sure.

[Deep13]

irishcaper - Yes, it should be temporary but I hope it does not remove my pages from its index (like it did for backlinks)

[visio]

yes, it is strange home page PR0 in all 75 datacenters I checked, but an internal page
http://www.whoisdeep.com/category/tutorials/

is PR4 in all the same datacenters:
http://www.linkrink.com/cgi-bin/prdi...orials%2F&cpr=

How many days ago is it like this?

It is worrying but it will probably be corrected some time soon.

And of course PR is important.
Two websites both of them optimized for the same keyword, the one with higher PR will come on top for that keyword, not only that if you have a PR8 or 9 just on link sales you can make a nice income, I dont know if it plain ignorance or just being naive which makes a person say that PR is not important.
Of course if your site PR is 2 then PR is not important.

[Deep13]

visio - Yes PR most of the internal pages remain same but the problem is only with home page. I can see new PR assigned to some of the recent pages too.

I noticed this issue couple of days back..actually one of my friend pointed out to me..

[swirt]

You do have canoniacal issues. Do a search for a snippet of unique RECENT text from your home page
such as

"So, in short, MS is trying to say is: Pay Rs. 9,000 for the console in India and buy it. Don’t bother us if you have purchased console from out of India."

and what gets returned does not include www. Yet searching for a bit of unique text from an older post on your home page (farther down the page)

"Ramdayal (Sohail Khan) and Phoolwati (Ishaa Koppikar) are newly married couple where Ramdayal wants to spend more time "

And it returns the www version of your site. Your PR has just been misplaced. Solve the issue within webmaster tools or use modrewrite to eliminate the non www version. Your PR will come back.

You say that you think the loss of PR may be affecting your traffic, have you noticed a change in your position in the SERPS for various phrases?

[searchsandbox]

My toobar shows a PR=0. I also ran a quick check over at SEOLogs. Looks like 2 data centers are reporting a PR=5.

Have you noticed an impact on your traffic? I agree with the other posts about not paying too much attention to PageRank. If you notice a significant decline in traffic then I would dig deeper.

Are you still showing up in the SERPs for your top keyword searches?

[Deep13]

swirt - I still don't think the issue is because of WWW and non www url. It used to be PR5 for both earlier and now it is PR0 for both. Even site: and link: results are same for both.

I did not say that I am facing descrease in traffic because of that, there is some change in traffic but it is difficult to say that it's because of PR change. I think I will monitor the traffic for a week and then only I can come to some kind of conclusion about it.

[Deep13]

searchsandbox - I do not see much of a difference in ranking. For one of the top keywords my position changed to #2 from #1 but I do not think it is because of that, it might be natural change.

I just checked the keyword stats in my stats software, I am still in top 5 position for my top keywords.

I am sure this is some temporary issue but just curious to know the reason if possible.

[goldrake75]

Hi Deep13
I'm in your same situation with one of my site. It's a directory.
I don't know the reason why, but it is like a ban

After the PR0, I saw low traffic and low placements in Google; also I saw low Googlebot activity, and for this reason my pages came into Supplemental Results.

To get out of this situation I tried several things:
1) Reenginered the site completely
2) Removed all the links to expired websites (checked 1 by 1 !!!!)
3) Signed up with Google Sitemaps
4) Cross my fingers and Prayed

[Deep13]

My case is bit different I guess..

The ranking (SERP) is not much affected but like i said earlier i will need a week to know the reason for the low traffic for last couple of days. But as I see in my stats software, it shows me many people are coming from google right now. (I am using w3counter.com - it shows me live stats)

I personally feel, my site's PR changed to 0 due to some bug or error in Google's algo or DCs. But now, only google can tell the exact reason.

Deep

[swirt]

Originally Posted by Deep13

I personally feel, my site's PR changed to 0 due to some bug or error in Google's algo or DCs. But now, only google can tell the exact reason.

Deep

It is a bug, an ongoing bug with how Google deals with domain names. Your problem may get worse if you continue to take the "denial" approach, the bot now has a non www version. It will spider the non www version and the www version. More of your pages will start to lose PR. The solution is simple. It won't go away by saying that you don't think it is the issue.

[Deep13]

I have already made changes google webmaster tools panel and set preferred domain as www but from my experience I did not feel that it is because of www and non-www issue. But I may be wrong too as I think only google will be knowing the exact reason and Google is never going to come and reply here haha

[westie]

I've got you as pr5 here in UK with around 253 backlinks on google. Probably some kind of update going on - I've seen a few big sites with PR0 today!!


http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourc...sdeep%2ecom%2f

[Deep13]

It shows PR5 and correct backlinks in 4 datacenters mainly.

64.233.163.107
66.249.91.83
72.14.203.19
72.14.203.115

[visio]

Quote:

"I run a personal blog which was PR5 for quite sometime. But suddenly in this PR change it become PR0, the site not banned, internal pages still hold PR. But home page PR is gone. It shows around 1100 pages of the site crawled till now but the backlink count has become 0 for some reason. (It used to be around 179 earlier)"

So in the UK Google datacenter you have 253 backlinks, perhaps when this update is over you end up with PR6!

Have hope...

[Deep13]

visio - as long as traffic does not decrease PR does not matter to me. But my main concern to open this thread was to know the reason for this sudden drop.

[myfreeforum]

Originally Posted by visio

And of course PR is important.
Two websites both of them optimized for the same keyword, the one with higher PR will come on top for that keyword, not only that if you have a PR8 or 9 just on link sales you can make a nice income, I dont know if it plain ignorance or just being naive which makes a person say that PR is not important.
Of course if your site PR is 2 then PR is not important.

Actually if you are referring to the PR 2 website in my sig, it brings in a couple of grand a month. But the conversions don't come from the main page. They come from highly targetted deep pages.

That's what I was saying....striking good search terms can be more important than PR sometimes. But you are right. I will keep trying to improve PR so I can become rich!

[visio]

Deep13 I think that you should not worry for another 2 -3 days, I have a site PR4, last week most datacenters were at 0 then it started to recover and I could see hour by hour the datacenters were slowly showing 4 and today all of them are 4 again.

If it doesnt recover tehn you should really consider that perhaps there is something with the www.

[swirt]

Originally Posted by visio

And of course PR is important.
Two websites both of them optimized for the same keyword, the one with higher PR will come on top for that keyword,...

Three years ago that was true. It is not true any more. It is quite common to see toolbarPR3 sites beating toolbarPR5+ sites for a search. toolbarPR does not address relevancy. actualPR from which toolbarPR is derived is still only one of many many factors that determine where a site gets placed in the SERPS.

[visio]

My dear Myfreeforum,
I give you my word that I did not check anyones sig. and certanly not yours.

Sure I dont intend to be personal!

But lets hope all our sites become PR9, ok?

[just-trying-to-help]

I'm getting a PR of 5 on my bar so I'm sure it is just a temporary glitch, give it a couple of days and then start worrying about it.

Off Topic.
your right menu seems to have fallen below your content which can be very annoying for your visitors,
I've checked on 2 IE computers, I don't know if this is happening for others but you may want to fix it up. It shows OK in Firefox though.

To fix it, open your style.css,
whoisdeep.com/wp-content/themes/laila-2.1/style.css
and change your #wrapper WIDTH to 770px instead of 750px

#wrapper {
width: 750px;
margin: 30px auto;
background: #FBFAF5;
border: 5px solid #fff;
}

That should do it..


Ken

[Deep13]

Ken - Thanks. Basically I too noticed the issue, I am just in process of finishing my custom theme :) It won't have these kind of issues.

[visio]

Originally Posted by swirt

Three years ago that was true. It is not true any more. It is quite common to see toolbarPR3 sites beating toolbarPR5+ sites for a search. toolbarPR does not address relevancy. actualPR from which toolbarPR is derived is still only one of many many factors that determine where a site gets placed in the SERPS.

Quite false, the sites you are mentioning are not optimized 100% for that keyword.

If they were then the site with higher PR will come on top.
Let me give an example you make two sites, each is optimized for "solar panel information" both of them using different content but with the same ratio of keywords, the same amount of words, etc. Now you get some links, one of the sites you make sure to link to more sites or at least link to a site with high PR, soon you will see that the site with more links or with a link on a high PR site will have a higher PR then the one which as fewer links. Now make a search on Google the site with higher PR will come on top.

I know this because this was a test case and the results were clear.

[swirt]

Originally Posted by visio

Quite false, the sites you are mentioning are not optimized 100% for that keyword.

There is no such thing as 100% optimized. If it were that easy, websites would just be designed by formula.

Originally Posted by visio

... I know this because this was a test case and the results were clear.

No science comes from one test case. You are completely leaving out the effect of where the inbound links are coming from in terms of their relevancy to the topic and the anchor text used in links to the site.

A current search for "solar panel information" (without quotes) returns a PR3 in the number 1 slot and a PR4 in the number 2 slot, a PR0 in the number 3 and a PR4 in the number 4, and a PR6 occupies the number 10 spot ...
Repeat this for 100's of phrases instead of just one and you start to develop the picture that actualPR is only one factor out of a hundred in the placement of a site in the serps.

[visio]

Originally Posted by swirt

There is no such thing as 100% optimized. If it were that easy, websites would just be designed by formula.

No science comes from one test case. You are completely leaving out the effect of where the inbound links are coming from in terms of their relevancy to the topic and the anchor text used in links to the site.

A current search for "solar panel information" (without quotes) returns a PR3 in the number 1 slot and a PR4 in the number 2 slot, a PR0 in the number 3 and a PR4 in the number 4, and a PR6 occupies the number 10 spot ...
Repeat this for 100's of phrases instead of just one and you start to develop the picture that actualPR is only one factor out of a hundred in the placement of a site in the serps.

On my area, Google:
#1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel PR6
2# http://www.solarpanelinfo.com/ PR3


3# http://www.mysolar.com/pv/techsolarpanels.asp PR4

10# http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/home PR6

For a person who doesn’t no much about about search engines of course he will say the site in second position is a PR3 and is higher then the site on 10th position which is a PR6, so PR is not important.

Wrong, lets go and check the site on the second position, On a number of occasions this site on the body text uses,
information relating to solar panels
information on solar insolation

Now the site on 10th position not once uses the word information anywhere on the body text.

I say again 2 sites optimized 100% for a keyword, the one with higher PR will come on top.

It is really incredible how much disinformation there is on SEO!

[swirt]

Originally Posted by visio

On my area, Google:
#1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel PR6
2# http://www.solarpanelinfo.com/ PR3

The wikipedia site is not an organic listing. Notice how this sentence appears beneath it
"According to ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel" it is a definition feature added by Google. You'll also notice it has a click tracker code in the url ... Google is playing here. ;-)

The actual organic listing for the wikipedia article appears on page two of the SERPS.

Links from relevant sites and good anchor text trump toolbarPR. This is the current reality of the web according to Google.

[SemAdvance]

Hi Deep

As I showed you straight from Google itself, it sees your website, split as four different URLs and as such each URL has its own assigned Google PageRank, and each is diluted.

Canonical URLs are shortcuts to your site however Google assigns PR by links, whether canonical or absolute.

IF I was wrong, Apache would not have a resolution for the problem, found here.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rew...ite_guide.html

I wont argue with you over the matter...you can choose to ask questions for that which you don't know and then argue with the answer...

or fix whats wrong when someone else shows it to you in black or white.

Peace

[Vitallywell]

Deep,

You are back to a PR5 (today). As long as you are following the rules, don't worry - that is all you can do. Google goes through many gyrations. I believe it is in the interest of content, even though one of my websites have personally been devestated and I do not know the reason.

Life is short. Do the right thing and enjoy a clear conscience. Good luck.

[Deep13]

Originally Posted by SemAdvance

Hi Deep

As I showed you straight from Google itself, it sees your website, split as four different URLs and as such each URL has its own assigned Google PageRank, and each is diluted.

Canonical URLs are shortcuts to your site however Google assigns PR by links, whether canonical or absolute.

IF I was wrong, Apache would not have a resolution for the problem, found here.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rew...ite_guide.html

I wont argue with you over the matter...you can choose to ask questions for that which you don't know and then argue with the answer...

or fix whats wrong when someone else shows it to you in black or white.

Peace

Hi,
I did not mean to hurt you or anything, it was just that I somehow did not feel the issue with Canonical URLs because the PR is not divided in my case, it is same for www and non-www domain. The same applies for queries of site: and link: parameters.

I am really sorry if I have hurt you or something, I just did not mean to.

Coming back to the site's PR - it is still same for me and 0 according to live PR checker, I will keep this thread updated.

Thanks
Deep

[edhan]

I see it as PR 5.

Google has just updated all PR for my newly build sites as well as existing sites. So, it might be showing you the new refresh PR. You should be still PR 5.

[scanmonkey]

Originally Posted by Deep13

Hi,
I did not mean to hurt you or anything, it was just that I somehow did not feel the issue with Canonical URLs because the PR is not divided in my case, it is same for www and non-www domain. The same applies for queries of site: and link: parameters.

I am really sorry if I have hurt you or something, I just did not mean to.

Coming back to the site's PR - it is still same for me and 0 according to live PR checker, I will keep this thread updated.

Thanks
Deep

Hey Deep,

You have a canonical issue. It can't hurt you to resolve the problem and might even help. I'm sure that you didn't hurt SemAdvance. It is what it is.

[ddwebguru]

Deep
it may several causes
1. it may for the google datacentre algo (google updated it's PR algo on 23rd Jan'07)
2.you said you solved canonical issue through google webmaster account, it's ok, but you have to wait
3. one more thing i saw your site home page with lots of links, we know that more links = - PR
so if you add a code in the link i think PR will be return
code is > Deep

hope will ok

[Clint1]

Originally Posted by SemAdvance

You have a canonical URL issue and as such Google has misplaced your PR

Results 1 - 10 of about 745 for whoisdeep.com/

Results 1 - 10 of about 723 for www.whoisdeep.com/

Results 1 - 2 of about 3 for http://www.whoisdeep.com

Results 1 - 1 of 1 for http://whoisdeep.com

Go to Google Webmaster tools and select the domain you want Google to use or you can use htaccess and mod rewrite rules to direct all incoming urls to the absolute URL and fix your PR issue this way.

That G WMT console area has nothing to with with http requests, it's only for the way your results are displayed in the G index. To fix the www and non-www issue, you'd have to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file.

Deep, be advised that doing that, may not change anything PR wise. The PR on ALL of my sites has dropped dramatically and they all have a 301 redirect.

Also know that on one of my sites that G slammed by TWO PR spots, it was trashed 4 pages back in the damn index where it WAS on the FIRST page! This is for several search phrases. So, something bad could be in the making for your site.

[Clint1]

Originally Posted by ddwebguru

3. one more thing i saw your site home page with lots of links, we know that more links = - PR
so if you add a code in the link i think PR will be return
code is > Deep

What exactly will that nofollow tag do? Many people have done this (add links to their homepage) to try and bring these pages out of the bowels of supplemental. Will that tag hurt this, as in prevent the pages from being indexed, or keep in the sup index? Or, will it ONLY stop PR from being diluted? Thanks.

I think the cause of all this is simple: G screwed up their PR algo....AGAIN.

[swirt]

Originally Posted by ddwebguru

3. one more thing i saw your site home page with lots of links, we know that more links = - PR
so if you add a code in the link i think PR will be return
code is > Deep

Just to clarify this. Links on a page to external sites do not reduce the PR of the page they are on. The worst they do is limit the amount of PR passed on to your own pages that are linked to from the home page (downstream pages).

Using the nofollow attribute in the way ddwebguru suggests is an abuse of what the attribute was designed for.

[Clint1]

Originally Posted by swirt

Just to clarify this. Links on a page to external sites do not reduce the PR of the page they are on. The worst they do is limit the amount of PR passed on to your own pages that are linked to from the home page (downstream pages).

I always heard it DID dilute the PR.

What about links to my internal pages? Did that dilute my homepage's PR?

[Clint1]

Originally Posted by swirt

Using the nofollow attribute in the way ddwebguru suggests is an abuse of what the attribute was designed for.

Please explain. ;) But would it actually work for his intention?

[Deep13]

Originally Posted by ddwebguru

Deep
it may several causes
1. it may for the google datacentre algo (google updated it's PR algo on 23rd Jan'07)
2.you said you solved canonical issue through google webmaster account, it's ok, but you have to wait
3. one more thing i saw your site home page with lots of links, we know that more links = - PR
so if you add a code in the link i think PR will be return
code is > Deep

hope will ok

Hi,
Thanks for the suggestions but for some reason I differ with the points mentioned.

Yes, i did change the preferred domain to www from non-www but I still stand by my point that it was not causing the issue. And like you said earlier, yes, it will take sometime :)

About the point 3 - nofollow tag - I do not think more links can cause the problem and adding nofollow tag in those links will be kind of unethical for me as they are my friends.

B5media.com or any blog network site will be best example for more outgoing links from one page.

Thanks for all the efforts.

Best Regards,
Deep

[myfreeforum]

Originally Posted by visio

My dear Myfreeforum,
I give you my word that I did not check anyones sig. and certanly not yours.

Sure I dont intend to be personal!

But lets hope all our sites become PR9, ok?

Hey visio, thanks for the input! You got me thinking and I was looking at one of my sites with a lovely PR0 on the front page. However when I trolled around I found a PR3 on a deep page with a Google Referal Adv. On it! Maybe you just have to say Google, and it will come. :)

[swirt]

Originally Posted by Clint1

I always heard it DID dilute the PR.

What about links to my internal pages? Did that dilute my homepage's PR?

Thats the funny thing with bad info, it keeps coming back over and over again. ;-)

Here is the short version, but if you are really interested in the longer version you might want to read one of the many longer version on the net, including one written by Matt Cutts.
Pagerank is awarded to a page by the links coming into that page. No links on the page can alter the PR of that page in any way. Whatever PR a page has is distributed evenly through any links on the page. So let's say your home page has a PR of X and you have 3 links on that page. Each link gets X/3 If all three of those links are to pages within your site, then the PR is kept within the family which then helps (as 1 of MANY factors) those pages show up better in the SERPS. And PR "flows and accumulates" just like that through a site, page by page. In the same example, if your home page still has a PR of X and it still has three links but this time they are to other websites, then the PR gets passed to other sites and not to the deeper pages of your website. You can decide how you want to distribute the wealth of PR within a site. So, no link on a given page can ever decrease the PR of that page, it may deprive deeper pages within the site if you have a lot of outgoing links to other sites, but that is all.

This is one reason why it is not a great idea to have lots of links on your home page that lead to other websites. (the other is that it is usually bad buisiness to send people to other places before they have had a look around first ... same reason why if you had a brick and mortar store, you wouldn't put advertizements on the front door for a sale that some other store is having. If you are concerned about maximizing PR for your benefit it is best to do most of your links to other sites on "end of the road" pages (think of how most directories are set-up .. you dig for a bit, then you get to the links that leave the site)

The purpose of the nofollow attribute was to use it for links that appear on a site that the site's owner has little control over (blog comments, forum posts, guest book spam ...) It was intended to tell the search engines, "I can't vouch for these links, so please don't count them against me." (because who links to you can't hurt you, but who you link to can) It currently appears to not allow PR to flow to that site either. But, if you use it on links you do have control over, two things may happen
a) The site may get seen as abusing the nofollow attribute, which who knows what that would bring. (not likely, but entirely possible)
b) Your site can't get any kind of recognition as being any kind of authority if it is on record as not officially linking to any sites. (remember, a site is judged by its own content, and who it links to, among other things) Who you link to is as important as who you don't link to.