LegalAlien - 7:03 pm on Dec 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

tigger,

>>> would that not happen after the next PR update? <<<

Yes, for Jagger-related penalties. But remember the PR update in September? That's when our serps tanked; just prior to Jagger commencement. I went through all links at that time and discovered we'd lost around 40 percent of total inbound PR. There were many pages everywhere I looked that dropped PR -- particularly deep pages.

For many sites I think the swings and round-abouts of Jagger got intermingled with this PR update, and everyone just focused on Jagger and assumed this was the sole cause of their demotion/tanking. A 40% drop in PR share would certainly push sites out of serps for competitive phrases.

I know that many in here will argue that PR updates are irrelevant, as PR is assessed on an ongoing basis. But if this were the case, we wouldn't see serp fluctuations following each PR update, would we? So IMO this can't be correct.

Different phrases tanked for many people in here at different times from September 22nd onwards. I think this could have been that all those different data caches were prolonging the effects of that PR update, and were affecting serps depending on which data set was being pulled. As Jagger was in progress, it was easy to assume Jagger itself was causing this.

I'm going off subject a bit here, as there's more I want to say about this...

In very competitive areas, I generally see a few 900lb gorillas that never shift, and the rest are made up of what I would call 2nd-tier (or almost-contenders). The difference (backlinks, PR, "trust", traffic, etc.) between the gorillas and these "contenders" is huge, but the difference between the contenders themselves is marginal (I know there are also directories and review sites, but I'm not talking about those). However, these contenders get their status from varying sources. Some pay for very high-profile links, some do recips, and some are powered by genuine links and traffic from their customers.

The ones that had paid links from gorilla-site homepages dropped, but recovered quickly (or didn't move at all). Obviously the gorilla sites' homepages didn't drop PR in the September update. Those with recips, or deeper paid links tanked, but didn't recover as quickly, and not to their previous top ten listings (we’re one of these). So the result of this 3-month fiasco currently seems to be pretty much pre-Jagger serps with the effects of that pre-Jagger PR update.

What we've tried to do is recover the PR share we had prior to the pre-Jagger PR update. We're about there now. I also see daily shifts in our serps that are directly related to traffic, and I also saw serp improvements during Jagger, that directly coincided with traffic increases, so we're also working on getting our traffic up to pre-Jagger levels. We're at about 70 percent now. Once we've done this, what's left will be Jagger only, so we can then focus on that. But as we’ve already trimmed everything way back, and analytically, we’re pretty identical to those that remained listed, I’m hoping we’ll just slot back in where we were.

There's a lot more I want to say here, but I'm trying to do 5 things at once and this reads really badly as a result. I apologize if this is difficult to read/follow.