Why has my PR gone from 5 to 0?

[TimmyMagic]

Hi,

I have just noticed that my website has a PR rating of 0. It was 5 last time I checked a month or so ago.

I recently had a shopping basket system implemented for the site. As search engines don't like dynamic URL's I realised that google wouldn't spider the shopping basket pages. Therefore I left the old pages (product descriptions, etc) and then just redirected the old order page to the new shopping basket.

I realise that this is duplicate content but as I assumed Google couldn't crawl the site, I saw no problem. Do you think this may be the reason why my PR is now 0? And how to I rectify this? I have no clue.

Cheers,
Tim

[mcavic]

Google will spider dynamic pages, but it depends on the url structure and your PR.

I'd say there are two likely possibilities. (1) Your PR5 was based on a link from a single PR6 site, and that link or that site is gone now, thus your PR is gone. Or (2) Google has manually penalized your site for some reason - you can write to [e-mail] to find out if this is the case.

[doc_z]

TimmyMagic,

are all pages of your site PR0? Also, how many backlinks do you have and are they shown when you use the link command? Are your pages still in the index and did the ranking changed, respectively?

[TimmyMagic]

Yes they are all ranked '0' now. Even the old pages which are still on there. I don't know about the link command, so I can't answer that one.

I guess I should email google and ask for a possible explanation. I suppose I may have been punished for just being ignorant of the rules.

Cheers,

Tim

[edavid]

Assuming Google's toolbar is working (check that forum to see how uncertain it is) here's my input:

I run dynamic sites and I have PR0 on all of them. I would not be surprised to see that the dynamic nature of the site has done this to you as well. I think the PR0 shows as more of a default when Google can't make sense of a page. For example, look at bloomingdale's site, any page below the home, and they're all zero (with query strings in the URL). The home page does not resolve to a query string (mine does), so at least that one page gets a rank.

I created some static exports of the data of my dynamic sites (my sites are spidered by Google if they have a simple query string, but not spidered by Google once they get to an "application" page, with an ampersand in the URL). The static export html pages all get higher PR (2-6, depending on the site). The static pages are all in a subdirectory, all linked to from the dynamic site on pages that ARE indexed in Google.

It used to be that even pages with a query string were not indexed by Google, just the root home page. Then finally our main pages got in, but no application pages. Ultimately we gave up on waiting for Google to index the dynamic content and do not want to submit the product pages all by hand (why can't they set up a feed like Froogle?). So I put together the static export. Maybe like AllTheWeb, they'll figure out how to spider the dynamic sites like ours, but until then, this is my only solution.

I think what may be happening is that the toolbar technology is having trouble with the query string as well and hopefully, it will catch up to where the spidering technology is and sites like ours will have some value again.

If your dynamic content is getting fully spidered and indexed, because your URLs are cleaner than mine, then perhaps adding a NOINDEX tag to the dynamic pages will help, if it's the duplicate content that's the problem. It could be that a competitor turned you in for having "doorway" pages in an attempt to stuff the index. After adding that tag, you could write Google to see if that's the case.

Lastly, if you remove the old static pages, make sure to handle those with a good custom 404 error page.

[oodlum]

Google can do dynamic content OK, it just doesn't like anything with "id=" or more than a couple of variables.

Just do a rewrite so it sees plain URLs

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