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I thought about a penalty, but then we began looking deeper into this. Our secondary site has maintained a Page Rank of 5 for about 8 months now - no changes at all in backwards links, and this too dropped a point to a 4.
We also see some competetors that have held 6's for a while, now have 5's. Yet I still come across the site that will have a Page Rank of 6 with only 60-70 inbound links - not even from "great" ranking sites!
Our position is about the same - but does anyone else notice that page rank is getting stricter? Has anyone else seen a decrease for no apparent reason?
As always - wishing you all the best!
I guess this means it's time to hit the pavement and solicit more links.
DARN!
I'm so busy CREATING websites, it's hard to keep up with the link campaigns!
Maybe I should hire an intern...
(sick humor, arr-arr.) :o Y
also i am seeing that results are now updated on www so it is possibility that update has ended.
but lets wait for another few days and see.
This past update we can noticed a great decrease in the Page Rank or our main site, as well as some of our Clients websites.
Have you seen a congruent drop in the SERPs as well, or only a change in your toolbar rank?
our site is down 1 pr across the board. we have also noticed many other sites down from 1-2 pr.we lost abour 50 links to our site.on the good side we moved up in all the kw searches.
mansterfred
Since it seems pretty widespread, I wouldn't think that all those pages linking to you and to other sites added more links so the value of the link to you decreased. It must've been a change in the algo. So yeah, maybe PR did get a bit stricter this update. Just my opinion.
our site is down 1 pr across the board. we have also noticed many other sites down from 1-2 pr.we lost abour 50 links to our site. On the good side we moved up in all the kw searches.
See... PR and SERPs are not really related.
A main site of mine was down during googlebots deep crawl (about a week).
Transferred to a new host, and googlebot continued but obviously it would have unindexed many pages that would have counted as backlinks, allowed internal PR transfer, and outbound links to other company owned domain.
PR dropped PR7 >> PR6 -- all sites and many internal pages showing PR1 - PR3 where they all had PR4 and above.
Traffic has increased though, and suspect SERP's did to on many, but didn't bother checking much since the cause was "rather known".
PR can make the difference but it's not the most important consideration.
I think rfgdxm1 has a good point. PR hasn't got stricter, Google's knowledge of it's "know" www has grown, therefore unless you manage new links (or PR on existing links increases) at the rate Google's archive increases your current PR will depreciate over time.
I noticed a strange thing with backward links for the last two updates. link: www.mysite.com went down from ca. 1500 to 1000 for the October update and down from 1000 to ca. 900 for this November update. I definitely did not lose any links, even got a few excellent dmoz links more and a bunch of links from low-ranking sites. Still found no explanation for this.
That's right, and may be that google has now a lot sites more in the index!
completely puzzled, (happily puzzled should i say)
we have done nothing different with the site that we have not been doing for months. deliberately staying away from 'tweakage'.
it seems that less importance is placed on PR this month. after all, we are the only one of our competitors which have lost PR, but we have noticeably gained in ranking.
but then again, our site is the best in its niche :)
(as of course is everyone's here ;) )
sometimes i still wish our month would not stand and fall with the google update ;)
our site has dropped one in page rank, and lost 200 or so incoming links.it seems that less importance is placed on PR this month.
I disagree. Based on what's being reported here my guesses are that...
1) Relative PR significance is the same.
2) The display scaling has been adjusted. Your actual PR relevance stayed the same (or may have even increased) even while your numbered attribute as displayed has gone down.
3) You haven't "lost" any incoming links... Google's just not displaying them.
Needs much more and broader research, but from what I've heard so far this might be a starting point. Many many people have reported a rise in PR over the last two updates, many people report a slight drop. A direct connection to rankings wasn't seen in either dropping or rising.
But i'm with Dante, if just about everyone loses this amount from PR restructuring (which sounds like that may be the case), it doesn't really effect you.
(Relate it to a true curve on an exam, if everyone scores the same -- whether the score is 50, 100, or whatever, you still get a C 'ranking' in relation to everyone else)
One competitor went from 5 to 6 with just 4 external backlinks the highest being a link from thier host (PR6/35 links off) that has been up for over a year.
Our positions hardly changed for our main keywords but our secondary keywords on internal pages suffered.
I am not sure as to the accuracy of this but I read in another thread in WebmasterWorld where someone speculated that there is only so much pagerank to spread between the pages indexed. If Google is doing a better job of crawling dynamic sites this could increase the number of sites in the index and spread out the PR.
apart from PR (of PR representation on the toolbar) scaling having changed there is one possible cause:
more than half of my backlinks come from my users' pages (my main site is a community). there used to be a link back to the frontpage on the bottom of each page. before september update i added a second link to my second site, which was new.
so the value transfered to the frontpage had to be shared with the new link on each page. (disregarding all the othe linking as this hasn't changed).
i have two PR6 sites instead of one PR7 now. i think that's a good example on how important the number of links on the linking pages are.
I think you folks are hitting the nail on the head when you said that PR is being "rescaled". Yet in still, this does not answer the question why one of our Client sites has HELD a PR5 for over a year with only 4 inbound links.
Guess we just have to see what next month will bring. At least PR is just a number - as long as we are up top in the results, I cant complain.. KUDOS TO GOOGLE! :)
My site went from PR6 to PR7 (oh happy day) but we only have maybe 5 more inbound links (of mentionable quality) than we did last month.
My position has stayed about the same for most of my keywords - but has gone up for a few of the really good 'uns.
I noticed that a major "network of sites" (rhymes with "Snout" dot com) dropped from 8 to 7 for a while during this month's update but went back up to 8, which has also happened during previous updates.
Of course, there's no way of knowing if my home page has gone from 6.01 to 6.99, or if that "network of sites" has gone from 8.99 to 8.01. But I imagine that, if a home page or internal page is occasionally bouncing above or below its normal PageRank, the page (and possibly the site) has had an upward or downward change in PR.
We are staying the same on all pages (I hope), have seen no flucuations at all yet.
We have the most active linking program and are always building new content. Iam guessing this is what kept us afloat.
The info I got from one of the "experts" - (I don't trust his opinion, he was wrong too many times) - that a PR from a foreign site will NOT help you much because googlebot will not be able to match the theme of the foreign site to your own site's theme. (Apparently "spiders" suffer from the language barrier , too :)
The info I got from one of the "experts" - (I don't trust his opinion, he was wrong too many times) - that a PR from a foreign site will NOT help you much because googlebot will not be able to match the theme of the foreign site to your own site's theme.
The general wisdom seems to be that Google doesn't use "theming," but keywords in anchor text may be important. If that's the case, the language of the site that links to you probably isn't important.
In other words, if the German-language Web site of Flughafen Widgetburg links to your Airports of Bavaria home page with the title "Airports of Bavaria," the fact that the surrounding text is in German shouldn't matter. To Google, the "Airports of Bavaria" anchor text is what counts.
Some marketing person had been bugging me to sell them advertising space on one of my sites lately. I don't even have any ads now on the site and it's fairly unrelated to their topic, so I didn't know why they were bugging me. Duh. I hadn't looked at the site in awhile and had not realized it had multiple PR6 pages.
