ODP listing page gone PR0

down from 5

[ppg]

I was in two minds whether this should go in the google or directories board. Hope this is the right home for it:

The ODP page which lists the site I work on has gone from a PR5 down to a 0 in the last google update. The cat above is still a 6, some of the other cats at the same level have also now got a 0, but not all of them.

Has anyone else noticed this happen to their ODP listings pages? I thought that perhaps the page may have been inaccessible when it was crawled, but surely that would mean a grey bar, or at least a guestimate from the cat above. The page's PR had been stable at 5 for a few months. odd.

[EliteWeb]

make sure your viewing the raw category and it doesnt have?stuff=id attached to it after the /

ie: dmoz.org/directory/subdirectory/cat/

and not .../cat/?bob=id7&sub=

[ppg]

yep, just the raw category, no querystring....

[rfgdxm1]

He just stickymailed me the cat. That isn't the issue. This child cat is PR0, while the parent cat is PR6. I'm at a loss to explain this one. The cat in question is a computer service commercial cat. Nothing at all about this cat that looks unusual or suspicious. Not only that, some of the child cats of this PR6 cat are PR2?! This makes no sense at all to me.

[motsa]

Isn't there a thread around here (in the Google forum maybe?) that mentions that PRs on categories can go up and down as Google does its Dance?

[rfgdxm1]

We are very much in between dances at the moment.

[Bluesplinter]

I don't know... I looked as well, and it appears there are four PR0 cats off the parent cat, and three PR2 cats. The other subcats appear to have a normal range of PRs. This looks like a job for GoogleGuy, since I can't see anything that would explain this.

At first, I thought this might be just a long delay in the PR showing up in the GoogleBar (I've experienced fairly long delays in the green bar appearing lately), but nope, these are actually showing 0/10. Weird. If it was a different type of cat, I might think they were linking to bad neighborhoods <g>, but the parallel Google Directory shows reasonable PRs for the actual sites.

[rogerd]

I've noticed some regional/locality categories that have zero PR when their parent cat is at least 3 or 4. As above, no dicey sites or anything suspicious - just a PR0 cat.

[Spica]

I have noticed that all DMOZ pages listing alphabetically visual artists-oil painters are PR0 while the parent category is PR4. This was like that already before the latest Google update.

[hutcheson]

<Wild speculation alert>Perhaps Googlebot GETs failed on some categories due to server load. That would be random, it would tend to affect all subcategories or links from one category (if they were accessed at about the same time), and ... it would go away (or move) after the next Google crawl.

[Bluesplinter]

Perhaps Googlebot GETs failed on some categories due to server load

That may not be such wild speculation. Considering the effects of the DDOS attacks that've been mentioned on this board, that could very well explain it :)

[steveb]

I noticed recently that some obscure/deep pages, like descriptions for a small category, that should appear as backlinks for other pages were not showing as backlinks. I would assume that Googlebot crawls the Directory like any website in a deepcrawl and misses some pages that only have one link in.

[rfgdxm1]

That's what I was trying to get at hutcheson. Rather than get into wild speculation, at this moment chalking it up to a "computer glitch" somewhere makes the most sense to me. At the moment I consider this the most plausible scenario.

[rogerd]

All DDOS attacks aside, I've had spotty luck loading DMOZ pages in the last few weeks. For soem reason, it seems to be the lowest level cats that come up unavailable most frequently. Perhaps GB is seeing the same phenonomenon, and these pages end up PR0. Perhaps on higher level cats with higher PR, GB keeps trying.