Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
PR is a measure of links, that's it.
If your PR goes down, that means that the importance of your backlinks (or the number of your backlinks) has gone down. It happens all the time
Maybe I'm going out on a limb, and feel free to disagree with me, but in my opinion, either you are banned (gray bar, excluded from the index) or you are ranking poorly. Low PR is only the measure of links.
What can be said about a site that sat idle for 6 months, had a PR2, and then was taken over by me, more content and several new links added and during the last PR update went from 2 to a 1.
It's not a matter of losing quality incoming links as it had none, in fact it was after they were added that the PR dropped.
Is it safe to say I may have 'interlinked' with other sites I have and this was seen as unnatural and penalized?
Did I get a link from a so called 'bad neighborhood'?
Increase in links, increase in content = Poor PR dropping to even worse.
Hard work paying off....
What can be said about a site that sat idle for 6 months, had a PR2, and then was taken over by me, more content and several new links added and during the last PR update went from 2 to a 1.
What can be said is "stop worrying, work on your site".
PR updates do not represent the state of PR at the time of the update. It represents the PR at some point since the last update.
Are you getting crawled? Are you getting any referrals from the search engines?
If so, stop worrying. You will give yourself an ulcer that way.
1: Don't fret over a PR drop from 3 to 2. As a matter of fact, don't fret over PR at all. PR will come if you do everything else correctly.
2: Do try to get relevant incoming links (as stated previously).
3: Do link to other sites (when appropriate) that will be of interest to your visitors. When I link out, I look at relevancy 1st, then the site itself. If the site is at all suspect in design or content I won't link. PR has little or no bearing on my linking decision.
4: PR is only one factor (amoung many) that can affect your SERP's.
Steve
yp, plenty of those "experts". Of course it's possible. It's also possible that aliens hacked Google's db and manually changed it. If you had a PR6 or 5, do dirty tricks (buy links, etc.) and then all of the sudden you have a PR2, chances are you are penalized.
One site owner I compete against thought he's smart, and had thousands of 1-2 keyword links from his (other) free counter site. Thousands of backlinks and did very last summer, but now he might as well get a new domain. His PR went from 7 to 3 and right now is 0. All pages are supplementals too. That's a penalty.
A drop from 3 to 2 is normal, and means nothing IMO.
