how to tell if a penality is on my site?

client site went from PR 4 to PR 1 in the April update

[martekbiz]

Hi There,

Was wondering is someone might be able to hit some point on why a legal site that has been fully indexed since Jan 1 has gone down to PR 1 from PR 4 as of the April update?

Seems very odd. I haven't been able to aquire any inbound links as they are difficult to obtain for "corporate" sites like a legal firm website.

Any thoughts would be great.

Thanks.

Aaron

[deft_spyder]

well, you have no inbound links... you sort of said it yourself. Maybe you had a link before that you didn't know about, and now its gone.

Or take a closer look at your code, see if you aren't breaking any rules.

Do the work to find people who will link to you. For every person who thinks noone will link to them, there is another person somewhere in the same predicament... you just need to find eachother.

[bhartzer]

I wouldn't be too worried at this point about the drop in PageRank. A lot of websites have seen significant drops in PR in the past month or so. I've seen some very major corporate websites go from having 1000+ links to its main page down to about 90 links showing in Google currently. I am beginning to think that this is because Google recently lost some of their data.

It's always been difficult for corporate sites to get links, and it will always be difficult. Some areas to concentrate on, though, are industry trade magazine websites' buyer's guides as well as any associations that the firm might be a member of (these non-profits typically have pretty good PageRanks).

[martekbiz]

Hey there and thanks.

I agree I shouldn't be tooworried about PR but it does help with a timlier and more frequent crawls as the site does get update fairly regularily with new articles and whatnot.

As far as inbound links go...the firm isn't a huge one so capitalizing on the name is difficult unlike the other bigger firms around.

Actually, since most of the sites we do are "corporate" we do find it very difficult to get inbound links without reciprocating.

Any ideas on that one?

Thanks again.

Aaron

[deft_spyder]

Yeah, reciprocate the link. While its not as agreat as a link that isn't reciprocated, it's all you have right now.

[jon80]

Maybe your initial PR of 4 was an estimated pagerank and PR 1 is the true Pagerank.

[bhartzer]

With corporate sites, issuing press releases (to get the firm mentioned in the media) and links from partners helps, too. Listings in Yahoo, DMOZ, and Business.com also play a help, too (but those probably go without saying).