29 replies to this topic

[Dave]

Hi There Guys,

Sorry to harp on about PageRank - I know it's not the be all and end all, but I'm worried about this recent change...

I have enjoyed a PR 7 ranking for a couple of years now. But suddenly my PR has dropped - to ZERO!

I've always tried to be ethical and non-spammy in my SEO work, and have not made any significant changes to the bulk of my site for a few months.

Where should I start? Can anyone give me some ideas as to why I might have lost my PR? Is there such a things as a PR0 checklist? Other sites of mine (on the same server) have been unaffected...

Any thoughts/ suggestions would be much appreciated. Please help as I'm really worried...

Dave

[OldWelshGuy]

Hi Dave, have your rankings/traffic suffered? and how are you checking the PR? chances are it could well be a toolbar glitch. Did you make any changes to the site and make use of a redirect in anyway, as if this is set up wrong it can result in PR confusion.

[tomsk]

Dave

Ar you refering to the site in your profile?

[Jill]

Usually these things are just a bug in the toolbar if you know that you weren't out doing spammy things, which you say you weren't.

Nothing to worry about.

[Dave]

It's not the site in my profile. The site is www.serif.com. I will check my rankings (lots of keywords to check) and let you know...

We added a new section recently and put some links to it on the homepage. There are 3 redirects involved to allow us to use short urls in our printed marketing, i.e. www.serif.com/primary . Could this cause the PR confusion you are talking about? Interestingly, I've had a customer in Cornwall say he can't see our website at the moment - but I've checked it on an external dial up and it's still there. Also, some people in the US couldn't see it a few days ago when it was still running. I wonder if external internet factors are to blame...

Will get back to you on the keywords.

Dave

[Dave]

All our rankings are gone! Also link:ht tp://www.serif.com returns no results. Why is this happening to us?

I'm worried that we've been penalised because all of our inbound links have also disappeared from the Gindex - what do you guys think?

Any suggestions would be very greatfully received!

[Jill]

I would still guess that it's a glitch.

However, I'm concerned because you mention that you check your rankings a lot. If you're doing this at Google, there's a good chance you've been penalized because of that.

That's the one thing where they will go after you if they can deterimine that it's your actual organization doing the rank checking.

Added: Dave, I still see a PR7 for your site.

[DigitalCamera]

You site has been penalized, contact help@google.com and ask them why, as you notice the link: command is not displaying your links

here is what was taking into account this pr update for your links

Google Backlinks

[Jill]

Digital Camera, what world do you live in where Google will tell you why your site is penalized? I've never heard of them doing such a thing, or have you had experience with this?

[Dave]

Thanks for your help Jill. I actually don't check my keywords/ rankings very often - just meant that I had a lot to check through this afternoon...

I don't think that could be it. Very interested you still see PR7. Is that in the google toolbar?

[sweepthelegnate]

I am seeing a zero on the toolbar when I check out the site. but that doesn't necessarily mean you won't bounce back.
you mentioned you made some changes recently:

We added a new section recently and put some links to it on the homepage. There are 3 redirects involved to allow us to use short urls in our printed marketing, i.e. www.serif.com/primary .

we made a lot of changes for a client about 6 months ago and their pr 6 dropped off the map along with all their backlinks. In a couple of months, the pr was back up and the links back. maybe some one will correct me on this, but I think when you make significant changes to a site google can drop you and kind of sniff you out again to see if you are still about the same type of stuff.


nathan

[powerofeyes]

Hello Dave,

It looks like a server glitch to me, Probably your server was not accessible when googlebot tried requesting pages, we have see this happen with google a lot, If your server is down for atleast a week then the pages of your site might become URL only listing like this

http://www.google.co...rum&btnG=Search

Your site has not suffered any sort of penalty for any bad ethics, It is an automated penalty because of server down/unaccessible for a long time, You said is this thread your site was not accessible in US for sometime it is most probably because of this,

Googlebot crawls your site from different Ips from various datacenters to detect possible cloaking, if your site is not accessible when crawling from a particular datacenter for a certain amount of time your site PR will be made zero and your pages will start to fall from google index,

See your homepage http://www.google.co...q=www.serif.com it is URL only, most probable reason is because your wouldnt wouldnt have been crawlable for googlebot,

Only solution is to wait, Your PR might return back to normal, CHeck your site often with US only proxy servers and other country proxy servers to find out your site is prefectly accessible from all those locations,

Regarding Jill seeing PR7 occasionally is because some datacenters show old pagerank, Your current pagerank is 0 I checked it with the updated datacenters and it is just a possible automated penalty, Just wait for sometime and make sure your site is 100% up all the time, you will get back your rankings and backlinks,

I checked for potential duplicate content issue and your site dont have that, so no worries there, And definetely there are no penalty for your site on any bad ethics,

[torka]

Dave, just had to say -- Kewl beans that you're with Serif! I've been using PagePlus for probably going on ten years or so now and have always been really pleased with it. On the one occasion that I ever had to call customer service, the person who answered the phone was very pleasant and solved my problem right away. It's been a pleasure doing business with Serif over the years.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled forum, already in progress...

--Torka

[Dave]

Cheers Torka. Glad you like our stuff. Even more pleased you liked our customer service!

[Shane]

Digital Camera, what world do you live in where Google will tell you why your site is penalized?  I've never heard of them doing such a thing, or have you had experience with this?

They do, though, provide an address and guidelines for re-inclusion at http://www.google.co...masters/2.html:

Your page was manually removed from our index, because it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. If you think your site may fall into this category, you might try 'cleaning up' the page and sending a re-inclusion request to help@google.com. We do not make any guarantees about if or when we will re-include your site.