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Since taking the site over I have added a simple JavaScript with scrolling text near the top of the page (the customer asked specially for it).
I added some small flash elements.
There is still lots of well written text and many pages (on theme).
Video clips added (in their own section, not on the front page).
Change of IP and server (if this is the problem I expect it to fix after a couple of months).
and from past experience, Javascript near the top is not a good idea.
Shak
<script language="JavaScript" src="/pathto/myfile.js"></script>This will stop Googlebot having to trawl through JavaScript before finding nice, juicy content.
JP
If you suspect its the JavaScript which could be causing the problem
It's not. It might cause some other problems, but it doesn't affect PageRank; which is just a measure of the links pointing to the page in question.
Kapow, any combination of three things could have caused the decrease in PageRank: there are fewer other sites or pages linking to you ("linkrot", as hightraffic10 said), the PageRank of some of the existing linking pages decreased -- or they added a number of other links to the pages -- causing them to pass less PR on to you, or an across-the-board change was made in how PageRank is calculated.
The last of those can probably be eliminated as a possibility, because there haven't been very widespread reports of decreases.
[edit]
After reading some of the following posts, it appears that in fact there have been! :)
[/edit]
But PageRank is not affected in any direct way by the other factors you mentioned: use of Flash, video clips, change of IP address, etc.
[edited by: JayC at 7:36 pm (utc) on Feb. 26, 2003]
Its linkrot.
google may also be rebasing the pr figures. as the number of documents grows, the "natural" pr of sites with any kind of incoming links will creep up (for the hardcore techies/maths junkies, the ratio of incoming edges:outgoing edges will tend to increase, thus inflating all raw pr scores to some extent, which in turn affects the toolabr reported scores. in theory, you could end up with a web where there are only 2 scores, pr10 for sites with at least 1 incoming link, and pr0 for sites that have no incoming links, and/or are penalised
I've watched all the sites in my space do a parallel dance. Sat I watch 15 sites and all of them have moved PR up or down pretty much in concert. So I think this is a base issue rather than a link rot issue.
In fact the higher your toolbar PR, the bigger the change if the base changes.
One of our sites went from PR7 to PR6. The only thing I could find that may have caused it is one site that had a couple of links to us was PR8 (They had links pointing in on a major news service). After the update (no link on news service) they crashed to a 5.
As for the effect on traffic - we lost 20 -25% overnight which translates into several thousand visitors a day. It was pretty freaky to watch - I'm pretty sure this one site made all the difference.
Strange this is our category ranking (in SJ as well) is still indicating a 7
Also, don't forget that PageRank changes with the wind, if 1000 sites get banned, that changes stuff. If 1000 new sites are listed, that changes stuff.
Just my 2 cents worth.
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 5:43 am (utc) on Feb. 27, 2003]
Also, don't forget that PageRank changes with the wind
It's certainly more dynamic than the toolbar indicator would show, since it's only an integer-based representation of the real thing. Your PageRanks can change every month but you won't notice it unless the change, no matter how small, happens to cross the threshold that makes the toolbar indicator jump up or down a notch.
There's more at work than simply PR in terms of where you are in ths serps. Lot's more. I dare say that PR isn't enough to get you a lot of clicks in. Conversely, a lower PR is generally not enough to prevent you from getting lots of clicks.
There are tons of threads on this forum where someone asks why is a PR4 ahead of 7s, 6s, 5s. The answer usually is that the search term was for "pink widgets," the high ranking site is pinkwidgets.com, has title, <H> and large font for this term, every site about pink widgets points to it with the anchor text of "pink widgets."
You may have lost that much traffic AND lost some PR but simply losing PR is not the only answer. Maybe your competitors moved up in the serps because they optimized their titles, other important text, or because they got better quality inbounds in terms of quantity, quality and anchor text. There are just too many pieces to the algo to get hung up on PR.
The other thing to consider is that the weighting of elements of the algo is always changing. I watched my site go from a 6 to a 7 and the same month my referrals from Google fell 10%.
Just my three cents worth!
Actually, you have a good point there - I just remembered too that Google stopped factoring in "alt" text this month too - that is correct isn't it? We had all our images linked to pages and with a few relevant keywords in the "alt" attribute.
Actually, you have a good point there - I just remembered too that Google stopped factoring in "alt" text this month too - that is correct isn't it?
There's been some speculation about that -- this thread [webmasterworld.com] is probably where you read it, but I'd say the evidence is inconclusive. GoogleGuy, by the way, said "I haven't done an exhaustive check, but I'm pretty sure that google has not changed its handling of alt tags anytime recently."
But whatever the changes, it's pretty likely that were some algorithmic changes that could have affected your rankings, in addition to whatever effect the PageRank change had.
We havn't been managing the site for long so I don't know the trends of referrals yet. It is also the only pr7 that we manage (was) so I was a bit disappointed to see it go to 6. Sure pr isn't everything but it was nice to have a pr7 site for a while. I still suspect the change in IP and server has a temporary effect. Changes in the PR base is a new consideration for me. Better get to work on finding more healthy relevant links.
