HELP!!!! Is Google toolbar PR playing up??

[SEORoy]

Hi all,

My site Google PR has gone from 4 to 0 suddenly :eek: ..anybody else experience same thing....

Though not much Importance can be given to Google Toolbar PageRank...however this showing 0 is alarming...and I cant understand for which reason.... I somehow need to get it back on...

Anybody experience same problem or knows if Google is at to something again....?

[Nacho]

Hi all,

My site Google PR has gone from 4 to 0 suddenly :eek: ..anybody else experience same thing....

Though not much Importance can be given to Google Toolbar PageRank...however this showing 0 is alarming...and I cant understand for which reason.... I somehow need to get it back on...

Anybody experience same problem or knows if Google is at to something again....?
Your traffic dropping to 0 would be alarming. Did that happen?

[SEORoy]

I cant check the effect on my traffic right now..

My ranking on SERPs seems to have been unaffected...though.

However the Google Toolbar is something that gets used by the people higher up in the company, if you know what I mean... so the PR disappearing suddenly has alarmed everybody...especially that our other sites PR are all unchanged...

Can anyone send me details of Google support...Seems that they dont really answer your queries ...but at least I can get this out to them...

Even though my ranking on SERPs seems unaffected.....I am very worried ...that this may be next to go off .....

[hiero]

If Google's PR system is down or being updated this can happen also. Have you given it a few days to make sure you are at 0?

[SEORoy]

If Google's PR system is down or being updated this can happen also. Have you given it a few days to make sure you are at 0?

No I have just noticed that my PR has gone 0....

I initially thought it could be something with Google PR system...but the PR of my other sites seems to be unchanged...

I am not sure but can this happen that only some sites get affected??....

By the way...Does any one know about an email address I can use to contact the Google engineers. I cant find one where I can email this problem.

[ephricon]

I've got the same issue, sorta. The site has been around for years and has lots of good links. It has been ranked a PR 5 or 6 for quite some time, but all of a sudden in the past couple days boom - down to 0.

HOWEVER, the funny thing is that this is just the homepage, and in fact only if you access it as www.domain.com. If you go to www.domain.com/index.ext than its still a 6!

We've got our interior links all pointing to www.domain.com/index.ext. I know this is not best practice and believe me, it will be changed ASAP. Is it possible Google sees this as two pages and causing a duplicate content issue? Did it just decide to give the PR to one of them and ban the other page?

I'm also very worried b/c now my homepage is gone in Google - not even listed for company name - but an interior page is. Its as if the homepage itself was banned and given PR 0 but all other pages are just fine and dandy.

Anyone???

[ephricon]

By the way...Does any one know about an email address I can use to contact the Google engineers. I cant find one where I can email this problem.

http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

[SEORoy]

HOWEVER, the funny thing is that this is just the homepage, and in fact only if you access it as www.domain.com. If you go to www.domain.com/index.ext than its still a 6!

I have gone through my site right now...and came across a page with PR 2 on my site...so it seems that not all pages have gone to PR 0...but what does that mean...??

Is this some temporary thing going on at Google...?

[hiero]

I'd give it a little bit because I have seen things come back around in a little time.

[ephricon]

I'd give it a little bit because I have seen things come back around in a little time.

Yeah that's generally been my stance when I've been working on a dozen projects at once, but in my current role I only have one site I'm responsible for so it makes it that much harder to just wait.

I'm considering doing a 301 for the index.html page to redirect to the root domain name (www.domain.com/index.html 301 redirect to www.domain.com). Thoughts?

[hiero]

If the index.html file is the default document then aren't they one in the same. Not sure what that's going to do for u.

[Jeff Martin]

I'm considering doing a 301 for the index.html page to redirect to the root domain name (www.domain.com/index.html 301 redirect to www.domain.com). Thoughts?

If your default document for the domain root is already index.html and all of your internal links to the homepage don’t use 'index.html' then I would say your fine.

My site Google PR has gone from 4 to 0 suddenly ..anybody else experience same thing....

Are you by chance using the beta 3 version of the toolbar? I have noticed MANY problems with displayed PR with the beta 3 toolbar. I believe the immediate fluctuation from the PR update has settled down, however it’s not uncommon to see your PR come back afterwards.

If your rankings haven’t changed and your sites pages are still indexed as they were before the PR drop then I wouldn’t worry. After all, toolbar PR is just eye candy.

[JohnW]

>I'm considering doing a 301 for the index.html page to redirect to the root domain name (www.domain.com/index.html 301 redirect to www.domain.com). Thoughts?

I don’t think you can do that. If you look at backlinks from www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index .html you may see that they are different. Sometimes the SE sees these as 2 different pages. One may eventually get killed as a dupe. Pick one or the other (I use the former but in your case you may want to pick whichever is the survivor, if indeed PR is 0 on the other) and make sure all links both internal and external point to the same page name.

[Jeff Martin]

I don’t think you can do that.

Actually you can modify the http header to send anyone anywhere you want with any http response code you want. Theres not much you cant do on the server side.

In ASP you do this with:
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.addheader "Location", "http://www.mydomain.com"
Response.end

[ephricon]

>I'm considering doing a 301 for the index.html page to redirect to the root domain name (www.domain.com/index.html 301 redirect to www.domain.com). Thoughts?

I don’t think you can do that. If you look at backlinks from www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index .html you may see that they are different. Sometimes the SE sees these as 2 different pages. One may eventually get killed as a dupe. Pick one or the other (I use the former but in your case you may want to pick whichever is the survivor, if indeed PR is 0 on the other) and make sure all links both internal and external point to the same page name.

Yes this is exactly what I fear has happened. I just started on the site and had not yet had a chance to make sure all links pointed to www.domain.com. As such, I believe Google indexed both versions (www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html) and saw them as duplicates and killed the www.domain.com version.

I plan on changing all the links that point to www.domain.com/index.html since those are all internal and I can change them. All the inbound links point to just the domain so they are fine. Problem is that I fear I'm too late. I fear they've already canned my www.domain.com version since the PR suddenly dropped to 0.

Anyone have any experience with a legitimate accident like this concerning the dup. filter and getting things sorted out??? I'm hoping the 301 redirect will at least transfer the PR from the www.domain.com/index.html which still has it to the www.domain.com which suddenly lost it.

[ephricon]

> (I use the former but in your case you may want to pick whichever is the survivor, if indeed PR is 0 on the other) and make sure all links both internal and external point to the same page name.

Here's the quandry. Going just by PR I'd say the /index.html version is the survivor. Yet, neither are showing in the SERPS at all for anything. So even so I can't choose the /index.html version and point all links to that since all inbound links from the 1,000 + sites I don't control point to just the domain name. I can change things the other way though and point all my internal links to just the domain name, which I'm going to do. I'm hoping somehow this will correct things but I fear it may take quite a while.

[SEORoy]

Hi,

I have been doing some checks/observation today... seems that there's been or still is some activity on Google... as for example... the no of pages indexed on Google was returning 303 last night, and 294 this morning.... which got me really worried... but in the afternoon.. it went back up to 328.... I have been seeing 314 indexed pages for last couple of months....

I am using this http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp tool to see if I can find out about any differences amongst datacentres...

From what I can see ...most of the datacentres are showing 328 indexed pages...just a couple showing 313-314 indexed pages... but now I came across 3 datacentres showing 0 indexed pages.... So should I start worrying now...

I have read that google are restricting access / hiding their datacentres from public so could it be that the datacentres showing 0 indexed pages are not valid any more... OR is it that these datacentres have not been updated yet... OR .... is it that My site is being removed ....???

The datacentres in question are:
1. 216.239.57.98
2. 216.239.57.99
3. 64.233.183.104

Anybody has any ideas/advice....??

By the way...Though my PR has gone to 0 .... seems that my rank position for one or two keywords has actually improved since yesterday...so am not sure whether this means...that my PR will get updated soon.... ?? I am really really confused....

[JohnW]

>Actually you can modify the http header to send anyone anywhere you want with any http response code you want.
In ASP you do this with:
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.addheader "Location", "http://www.mydomain.com"
Response.end

The snippet of code listed will not work on a any server using "index.html" as the default document. You will create an infinite loop because those sites will try to load the same redirect document. The way this could work, is if you set the default document to something other than "index.html." I agree this could be used to clean up a situation where too many links are scattered between "www.domain.com/" and "www.domain.com/index.html".

[ephricon]

>Actually you can modify the http header to send anyone anywhere you want with any http response code you want.
In ASP you do this with:
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.addheader "Location", "http://www.mydomain.com"
Response.end

The snippet of code listed will not work on a any server using "index.html" as the default document. You will create an infinite loop because those sites will try to load the same redirect document. The way this could work, is if you set the default document to something other than "index.html." I agree this could be used to clean up a situation where too many links are scattered between "www.domain.com/" and "www.domain.com/index.html".

Thanks. In my case the homepage filename is actually index.jsp, I was just using index.html for illustration. Does this still cause that infinite loop b/c its still redirecting the homepage (domain.com/index.jsp) to the domain homepage (domain.com only) which is the same file, just different URL?

So lets say our primary default document on the server is index.html, but then it searches for index.php, index.jsp, index.asp, etc. if there is no index.html - would this would or do we have to not have the index.jsp marked as a default doc. of any kind even secondary???

[ephricon]

If the index.html file is the default document then aren't they one in the same. Not sure what that's going to do for u.

Yes they are - but not to Google. It has both the domain.com and domain.com/index.html as seperate pages b/c we've linked to each (which we will def. change). It also shows a PR 0 for domain.com and PR 6 for domain.com/index.html - so even though you and i know they are the same Google clearly doesn't.

[AussieWebmaster]

The loop gets annoying....

[Jeff Martin]

The snippet of code listed will not work on a any server using "index.html" as the default document. You will create an infinite loop because those sites will try to load the same redirect document. The way this could work, is if you set the default document to something other than "index.html." I agree this could be used to clean up a situation where too many links are scattered between "www.domain.com/" and "www.domain.com/index.html".

Yes it will work for any windows server, even for .html buy modifying the IIS properties to treat .html pages like ASP pages and send them through the ASP processor.

It will not be an infinite loop providing your code makes sure you arent already coming from /index.html. Whenever doing internal redirects you should always account for where someone came.

[SEORoy]

Hi,

I have been doing some checks/observation today... seems that there's been or still is some activity on Google... as for example... the no of pages indexed on Google was returning 303 last night, and 294 this morning.... which got me really worried... but in the afternoon.. it went back up to 328.... I have been seeing 314 indexed pages for last couple of months....

I am using this

http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp tool to see if I can find out about any differences amongst datacentres...

From what I can see ...most of the datacentres are showing 328 indexed pages...just a couple showing 313-314 indexed pages... but now I came across 3 datacentres showing 0 indexed pages.... So should I start worrying now...

I have read that google are restricting access / hiding their datacentres from public so could it be that the datacentres showing 0 indexed pages are not valid any more... OR is it that these datacentres have not been updated yet... OR .... is it that My site is being removed ....???

The datacentres in question are:
1. 216.239.57.98
2. 216.239.57.99
3. 64.233.183.104

Anybody has any ideas/advice....??

By the way...Though my PR has gone to 0 .... seems that my rank position for one or two keywords has actually improved since yesterday...so am not sure whether this means...that my PR will get updated soon.... ?? I am really really confused.... ....

I am sorry have just copied and pasted my post here...so that someone can advise..in case it gets mixed up with the Redirect discussion going on... :confused:

[JohnW]

>homepage filename is actually index.jsp, I was just using index.html for illustration. Does this still cause that infinite loop b/c its still redirecting the homepage (domain.com/index.jsp) to the domain homepage (domain.com only) which is the same file, just different URL?

I'm pretty sure that's right.


>our primary default document on the server is index.html, but then it searches for index.php, index.jsp, index.asp, etc. if there is no index.html - would this would or do we have to not have the index.jsp marked as a default doc. of any kind even secondary???

Not sure I understand the question. Jeff seems to be on the right track with his latest post, perhaps he should answer.

[JohnW]

Circling back around... this thread started with a question:

>My site Google PR has gone from 4 to 0 suddenly ..anybody else experience same thing....

I plead guilty to helping this thread get hijacked down a rabbit trail..... as SEORoy just pointed out to me by PM ;-)

To try and getback on track, yes there have been fluctuations in GPR lately, started around last Tuesday, for me at least, and settled down over the weekend.

It has also been pointed out over and over that PR does not always seem to be related to how a site ranks for certain keywords, however a sudden drop in PR is something that can be disturbing.

Can we get any comments about his question?

[SEORoy]

thanks very much John for the effort to get this back on track..

However I appreciate a lot the discussion that generated from the initial post...but I think that if I got this problem ...then surely somebody else will experience samething sooner or later...OR have already experienced this....

So this post can be at least of some help to these people.

Saying that I think ephricon's problem is bigger than this... mine has just lost the PR ...however rank position on SERPs still ok for the moment anyway...

But have to admit...and am sure lots of people here will agree... though the google toolbar PR is more of an entertainment/cosmetic value than anything else.... It is still important
1. to Upper Management's eyes...basically some of us..., unfortunately, gets evaluated based on toolbar PR.... Yeah...not solely on toolbar PR...nevertheless it is a major factor...is you see what i mean....
2. Since most of us...are trying to build links... having the toolbar PR showing 0 for your site...does not help.... and you can also endup losing precious links from high PR site... as they may think something is suspicious about your site because PR is 0.

Well I have been monitoring the different datacentres today... there seems to be quite some fluctuations ...in some of the datacentres...my no. of indexed pages got down to 0...but have just checked, 10 mins ago,....these datacentres now showing indexed pages around 300 ..... so these started to look ok...however...PR still showing as 0.

I think I saw one of the datacentres showing a PR 4 for my site...However when I tried again...it started showin PR 0... I am still monitoring...keeping fingers crossed.... :o