google gone crazy?

page rank gone from 2 to 7 over night?

[richardtknight]

Hi all, firstly glad to see webmaster world is back up again...............................

I've just started work rebuilding an existing site which was over 5 years old and had a page rank in Google of 2 and only 60 backward links.

I've almost finished the site which is now online. I ran a small Google ad words campaign for the client to test the water has to how much it might cost. I left it running for 5 days.

I've just checked the site and its page rank is now 7 with over 2500 backwards links, most to BBC news web pages and other very strange places, I've searched these pages for any reference to my site and not one of them has a link back.

Can anyone cast an idea as to what's happened....?

[richardtknight]

no one get any ideas as to why then /

[Frequent]

Check the cache. Odds are your adwords campaigns were running on those pages and were cached/scraped with your ad in place.

Freq---

[kaled]

news.bbc.co.uk doesn't carry adverts.

There have been reports of google getting confused sometimes.

Kaled.

[blue_eagle]

How is the traffic richard?

[carrot63]

Could the backlinks from the BBC be from search result pages from their SE?

[stroudtx]

My PR went from 4 to 5 after the update. And yet our home page remains hard to find although we enjoy 1st place with many other pages in our site with are still a PR 4.

[richardtknight]

the traffic hasnt gone up at all, i'm trying to work out what key words the page rank is due to. All the backwards links pages on the bbc news site are comepletely NON related to my sites content

see [news.bbc.co.uk...]

I mean we have nothing to do with Afghans..

My site is a simple online portfolio/shop window for a catering company..

Non of the back linking sites carry goggle ad sense banners either...

[suggy]

I have seen evidence of this with other sites in the update. Looking at their backlinks and find only tradedoubler and affiliatewindow links that mention their domain in a variable (after?).

Google's broken at the moment, I think. Nevermind the algo the data seems a mess?

[Rugles]

I saw a new number count for backlinks this morning and I received a google alert this morn for a new backlink.

I do not have any faith in the backlink function on google, but the alert sometimes coincides with an adjustment in the algo.

So, choose to ingnore my post if you want.....

[Elvie]

I had the same thing happen to one of my sites earlier this year. It went from a 3 to an 8 PR over night and had over 30,000 backlinks, none of which actually pointed to my site. I had been excited because before that I was ranking really high for a couple broad search terms. Google sorted itself out and I went back to page 4 for those search terms, and back to a PR3, now 4 with only a few backlinks now showing.

[mcavill]

were you doing any redirects?

[Elvie]

I wasn't.