PR Drops from 6/10 to 0/10 & More

[bethabernathy]

Hi There - I have a client who had a PR on Google last week of 6 out of 10. It has now dropped to 0/10. They also have the ODP listing that is reflected in Googles Directory, although the Directory Category on the Google Toolbar is not Green. I am more interested in why a sites PR might drop so dramatically. Any ideas? Thanks, :D

[David Wallace]

Hard to say without actually seeing the site. They weren't doing anything that would go against Google's Guidelines (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html) were they?

[rustybrick]

Sounds like a penalty to me. PageRank was not updated this past week, so it seems manual to me. But I have a feeling that you should ask someone else to check the pagerank of this site. Feel free to PM or post the URL.

[rustybrick]

an update for whoever is reading this thread. the page is indeed a PR 6, the toolbar on the clients computer is caching an old pagerank.

Lesson to be learned, always ask more then 2 or 3 people to verify what your seeing. :)

[bethabernathy]

Hi There - The site I was talking about before related to the PR dropping from 6/10 to 0/10 now does so with www.rustybrick.com tools. The site is no longer reflecting any back links. I don't think it was a cached issue, but am not sure. Any ideas. -Beth :confused:

[Joseph Morin]

Check and see if its even in the Google index. Type www.domain.com into Google and see if information about the web site comes up...or if it says no information found. If its the latter, then there are other issues to be considered such as a possible penalty or indexing problems.

They might have had other issues that would prevent crawling, I've definately seen that before.

[bethabernathy]

I put the domain name in the google search box and the site was NOT found, although strangely when I do a search for various search terms the site does list. For their search terms the sites' ranking remains consistent. I wonder what this indicates?

The other thing is the client is Internet CRAZY (its' real estate) :rolleyes:. They have their assistants making webpages like maniacs and what they are doing is copying content from other sites for informational purposes. In addition they are spreading the same content to other domains they own some of which reside on the same host/server.

[Joseph Morin]

When you say that you see the site come up in the search results, is it the home page? Or internal pages? Based on your comment, I'm guessing that you have duplicate domains with similar content. Google may have had a problem in identifying which site to keep at the forefront and deleted your main site as a duplicate.

Another thing that may have happened which recently happened to a very large client of mine is that in the mad rush to make updates to the home page, some broken code was introduced by the clients in house IT dept which sent the SE bots in an infinite loop and subsequently dropped the home page from the index while keeping the internal pages intact in the archive.

[bethabernathy]

Thanks for your help. The internal pages come up, but not the home page. I have been monitoring this for a while and I was wondering if a site is receiving a penalty, can it take a while for the site to filter out of google? This PR drop happened immediately for the home page and now the other pages are slowly dropping. Thank you again. -Beth

[Joseph Morin]

Yes,

Because the home page is no longer in Google the internal pages are no longer receiving the benefit of a PR6 link from the home page therefore the internal link popularity will diminish as well and over time, you might remain in the index but wont rank as high as you did previously.

[megri]

We have a similar case our PR dropped from 6 to 0 but we ahve site in google and now the bacward links it is showing 30 earlier they were around 600. How ever ranking in results is the same

[rustybrick]

I have heard reports about homepages PageRank dropping to zero while all remaining insides pages's PageRank remaining constant. How many people have seen this since after this update?

[ategma]

me, page had PR 7 before, now 0, but the PageRank of pages inside is constant. (heard reports from other pages too) :confused:

Any logical reason?

[Joseph Morin]

The only time I've seen this is when there is a spider crawling issue or a dup page penalty of some sort.

[jlong17]

My site also dropped from a PR6 to a PR0. Our rankings in the SERPs have remained steady so far. But its the "so far" part that has me concerned. However, I'm glad I'm not the only one. Any ideas to what my options are to regain out PR-6?

[bethabernathy]

I think Google is doing something weird :confused: . Now the home page is listed on Google again. The Green directory icon goes on and off. The back links are sometimes at 60+ and sometimes at 0. All the pages are slowly losing PR dropping to 0 :eek:. -Beth