Higher PR, less visitors.

[oobot]

My page PR was 4 - this was for about a year. Than, few weeks ego it was risen to 5, but surprisingly in the same time number of visitors on my page went down 4-5 times!
Firstly I thought that there is no connection and it is a simple coincidence. However, after two weeks PR for this page was lowered back to 4/10 and within the same day number of visitors went back to first 4-5 times higher level.
Currently, 3 days ago PR was switched again to 5 and number of vistors dropes 4-5 times like it was before.
I did not make any structural changes on this page - all the time it is basically the same.

Can somebody explain what is going on, or how to go back to expected numbers of visitors with current PR?

[Vadim]

… what is going on, or how to go back to … current PR?

I believe, the PR that you observe in the correlation is not the real PR.

The point is that PR that Google shows, e.g. in the toolbar, is an averaged value and about a month old. It is not the real PR that Google uses internally for the current SERP.

The reason that you see different PR is probably that you see it from different Data Centers.

One of the possible reason why you observe the negative correlation might be, for example, that your site might sometimes experience the problems when accessed form the different geographical regions (broadband problems). When it happens, you might see PR from different data center than usual and it happens to be higher.

The bottom line is that you actually do not know how real PR behaves and it might happen that your problems are not related with the real PR at all.

Vadim.

[oobot]

If indeed there is such a delay in current page rank value (I have check it several times on different webpages), why there is a correlation between this shown value and number of visitors. I am 100% sure that this is not a coincidence and there is something going on either with Google or Google PR...

[beautifulname]

Our site is also facing the traffic dropping scince last PR update. Our main PR didn't increase, but the G traffic has dropped almost half while more new pages are getting PRs from 3 to 4.

I had thought the reason may be more competitors are getting higher PRs...

[Halfdeck]

You are assuming a connection between PR and traffic when there are many other factors involved. Your SE traffic depends partly on what keywords you're placing for and your ranking for those keywords - those factors are not dictated by PR alone.

More likely, the number of your pages indexed in Google and your competitors ranking for your keywords is on a post-BD rollercoaster ride.

[reseller]

oobot

"My page PR was 4 - this was for about a year. Than, few weeks ego it was risen to 5, but surprisingly in the same time number of visitors on my page went down 4-5 times!"

Are you talking about your homepage or any of your internal pages?

[oobot]

reseller

I am talking about my homepage and news pages. My homepage is also a place where we put up to 5 news per day and where 10 of such a news are visible in the same time. Therefore, decrease in number of visitors is visible on both - starting page and all news pages, where I am checking it.