PageRank from 4 to 1 in one week

[willow829]

The page rank for our site houseintoahome.com dropped from 4 to 1 this week. The site is not at all optimized, has no links from link farms, and does not use any SEO tricks that would cause it to get penalized.

I can't think of anything at all that has changed on the site recently that could cause this. It happened well after the "Florida" update so I don't think that is it. The only possible explanation I can think of is that our ecomm provider (Zoovy) automatically submits all of their hosted sites to the search engines once a month and maybe that could be considered SE spamming?

I'm not very technical, so if anyone could give me some ideas of why this would happen and what can be done to fix it, the help would be much appreciated.

[minstrel]

The so-called "Florida update" hasn't yet completed and many people are still reporting fluctuations in PageRank and listings.

Wait a while yet and see what happens...

[Conficio]

Hi Willow,
a rank is a relative measure.

If your page ranks with a google page rank of 5.0 today and all others rank between 1.0 and 4.5. Then you are on top - #1.

If some others in the list improve their page rank (by what ever method, legal or illegal, ethical or unethical), than they get ahead of you.

By the way #1 or #4 does not make much of a difference. Once you fall off the first, second or third page, you are at a disadvantage (because by the time people have scrolled there, they already read 20, 40 or 60 results and their attention drops). Most people actually read the brief summary, that is published with the headline. If you can make that a compelling reason to click on it, than you have won. (Most of the summaries are the descriptions of DMOZ I believe). If you are #1 or #4 is just of matter for the SEO freaks.

Happy surfing
K<o>

[cyanide]

Willow,
Welcome to WebProWorld !

How long have you been live?
My feeling is that google mistakenly gave you a pr 4 and that you really should be a 1 anyway.
I think it's pretty rare, although I've seen that happen a few times.

A few problems:
You have a grand total of 0 backward(incoming) links
Your description tag is a whopping almost 200 words, ten times what it should be
Your keywords tag is an exact duplicate of the description tag
You're using javascript for your links, which can be a hinderence as well.
Tell you provider to stop auto-submitting your site to the engines.

[willow829]

We've been live 18 months and had slowly built up to a 4 rank. We have a number of links from our manufacturers, other home sites, and directories, but for some reason when you do a link search on google, none of them show up. Our site is kind of a prepackaged design from our ecomm provider for nontechnical users and it doesn't give you any control over the code. They duplicate the keyword and description tag and use javascript for the links. We are moving to a new provider after the Christmas season and hopefully that will solve many of these issues.

[janeth]

I think Again I said I think Google has made some changes in the way they are counting links.

Any link going to the home page from the same website now only counts as one link. So if you had a site with 1,000 pages and a link to you on every page before you would have 1,000 links now you only get one.

I have only seen this happen when the links where pointing at the home page.

If I knew your web site address I may be able to be of more help.

[esotopic]

Greetings,

this is the first time I'm posting here, so I hope this reply is going to the right thread.

My site is live for a little over 3 month now, and finally at the end of Novemeber, incoming links to my site were finally shown on Google Search.

My Homepage ranking improved then to 4 with many pages rated 3 and 2.

Virtually over night last week, incoming links to my site disappeared from Google Search again and currently shows 0, while my rating dropped from 4 to 1 and 0.

At the same time my personal website which is live for about a year now and had a 5 and solid 4 rating, dropped to virtually 0, with only 1 incoming link showing in Google Search.

This is more than frustrating and I really do not know what to do about it, and why this has happend.

I wonder if it would help to write Google about it...?

http://www.esotopic.com

[janeth]

Hi esotopic,

If it was may I would work on getting more links ignore what Google is doing right now and once every thing calms down start checking again.