Forum Moderators: open
So I thought, why waste this keyword score on a pointless word? and I renamed the page electronic-design.html to reflect my main keywords.
After the last update I found the my new electronic-design.html does seem to be in the Google index (I can find it with a very specific search) but it has PR0. Other pages on my site retain PR5.
Is the PR0 because the page is new and needs another month to settle or have I transgressed some rule and got a penalty?
Do file names count?
Would I be right if I was to guess that you submitted the new URL and Google listed it, but that Google fetched the pages linking to it before you changed it (so it found no links)?
That seems the easiest explanation, if so then you should get the PR next month.
I didn't submit my new page to Google (should I have?). Google found it through my links so I'm still a bit puzzled. I guess I'll wait to see what my PR does next month. It's a slow game...
Do the pages linking to the new page all have PR2 or less?
I'd be more apt to agree with your assessment. I too have seen this occur and it scared the heck out of me. After the next update, the page shot to PR6 from PR0. I think timing is critical when renaming pages, especially around crawl time.
There are others here who have experienced the same thing. No need to worry about it. I would definitely keep an eye on it when the next dance begins, I'd be willing to bet that PR will filter through and you'll be just fine.
That's what it seems like.
pageoneresults:
> I think timing is critical when renaming pages, especially around crawl time.
What follows may be considered pedantic...
From a WWW point of view, I don't think that you can rename something. The fact that it is renamed in your filesystem is not known to the outside world. What you are doing is creating a new address with some content, and voiding (via HTTP 404) an old address that just happened to have the same content.
As far as I can tell, the point of the cycle in which links count towards PageRank doesn't always converge with the point where links are found; hence the temporary problem.
G.
Grumpus, you raise a very interesting concern, and I would like if you could expand on your suspicion. On what observations do you ground this suspicion?
Anyway, my site was new and many of my pages had a PR of 1 or 2 which made me get a lot of referrals from pretty deep in the Google rankings. One thing I was noticing on those deep listings in the SERPS was that there were some pretty relevant pages there with mine that had decent pagerank. The only thing I could figure out was that they all seemed to have very long URLS. They weren't necessarily even keyword ridden names, they were just long and/or had numerous special characters in them like "-". Most of my google hits are coming in from the top 50 now (or not at all) so I haven't done much exploration on this recently.
G.
