Forum Moderators: open
Recently, the page that "heads up" my directory where I link out to other sites, has had its PR dramatically slashed. It dropped from a PR4 or PR 5 to a PR1. It mysteriously dropped a few PR points over a month or two, and now, well, has very little left. So let's see if we can discover together if any Google penalties have been triggered. This may also serve has a
case study for others who may be experiencing suddenly PR degredations.
I raise this a critical concern, because I have a well respected site with high PR. However, my links pages have no PR at all (PR0). Doesn't look good when you're contacting other sites, and arranging to exchange links.
The Good Points
* The page in question is linked to directly from my homepage. All such equivalent pages - those linked to directly from my home page - have a PR of 5.
* The page used to have a PR of 4 or 5.
* The contents of the page haven't changed at all for ages
* The way the page is linked to hasn't changed
* The number of links pointing to the page (just the one from the home page) hasn't changed
* The page has no redirects
* The page has no cloaking
* The page doesn't have a high keyword density of anykind, so no keyword spamming there
* An almost identically arranged and equivalent page on another site of mine, but with different wording, hasn't been affected
* The link pages are created by me. No off the shelf page generation s/w that google might hate, used.
The bad possibilities
Here I'll list virtually anything I can think of which clever Googlers, like yourselves, may want to factor into the equation.
* The page links directly to my outging links page. Is there now penalities for outgoing link pages? However, the page itself has no outgoing links. So I would have thought that if Google were to say "oh, that's just a links page, I'm not going to give that any PR", it wouldn't affect a page that links to the link pages, but has no outgoing links itself.
* The page is quite short, with little content. Essentially, it has a search box, a link to my first outgoing links page, and a link to several "about this directory" type help pages, which are content rich
* The location of the page is www.mysite.com/directory/ . Does /directory/ automatically trigger a penalty?
* The page title has the word "directory" in it.
* The page only has one link to it. However, a sitemap page I have only has one link to it too, but it has a PR4 (lucky it)
* The /directory/ page links to /directory/directory1.html which only contains 4 or 5 outgoing links. So as link pages go, directory1 is generous to the people I link to.
* directory1.html links to directory2.html which links to directory3.html, and chains to many directory pages down the line. There are about 15 or so pages daisy chained together
* All the directoryx.html pages have the same title, but quite different content, that being the outgoing links, which is basically all that's on there.
* The page in question has a search box
So there you go. A simple page, with no outgoing links of its own, no spammy techniques used anywhere on the site, a well established page with a formerly high PR, that has definitely triggered something nasty in Google.
Your thoughts are welcome. Help me solve this Google mystery. I've included as much relevant information as I thought relevant.
My own analysis? Google has a special penalty for directories on your site. Although, the initial page, that has no outgoing links, shouldn't be seen as a links directory, but it apparently is. Weird.
Second possibility according to my own self analysis: Google has deemed that a long string of pages containing outgoing links, where the first page is linked to from your site, then each page only links to the next links page (in a daisy chain), as being a form of spam. Who knew? My purpose was to only have 4 or 5 outgoing links on each page, benefitting generously the people who link well to me, rather than having one page with 100 links on it. But who knows!
Confusingly, another site I have that has a links directory structured identically hasn't been penalized. Maybe it's just a matter of time. Mind you, it only has a directory of very small number of pages.
