pr0 punishiment

really cannot understand this one

[benihana]

I have a php based news site that is updated daily. To get round isssue of multiple variables in URL scaring the spiders, our consultant techie kindly wrote a script that runs once every night, taking all the news from the database and creating templated static html files with filenames such as news1.html news2.html etc. We have a page on our sitemap where all the news headlines are listed in date order, with links through to corresponding static pages. Until the recent crawl this was working very well and our traffic was growing at a steady rate.

We have approx 1070 news articles on the site. Prior to the google update, all the static pages had pr5 (homepage is 6),
Now the static pages from news1070.html down to 1010.html have pr5, but all pages (as far as i can tell) from 1009 - 1
have pr0.

Within all these pages there is 4 repetitions of the article headline - page title, meta desc, breadcrumbs (in a h1), and as the headline (in h1).

Any ideas why ive been punished on 95% on the pages? or just some general tips. our traffic has halved this week and im just a touched worried ;)

thanks

[edit] could it be becuase i have duplicate content? i.e. have the news stories available dynamically and also statically. [/edit]

[jimbeetle]

Hi benihana,

This might be too simplistic an answer but sometimes it's best to look at the simple things first.

Are all 1,070 links to the news articles all on the same site map page? That is, does it look something like this?

Home --> single page with 1,070 links --> static pages

If I assume correctly that the higher-numbered pages are the most recent and listed higher on the site map page "(news1070.html down to 1010.html have pr5)", that might be the description of the problem.

Google recommends that "If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages."

See Google Information for Webmasters [google.com]

You should consider breaking the site map into multiple pages (by date? by week?) and linking to each one from your home page if possible.

Hope this helps,

Jim

[benihana]

hmm that may go some way to explaining things.
the sitemap itself is exactly that - a proper site map to all areas of the site. It does have over a hundred links, but the pr is 5, so either google hasnt noticed or has accepted that its still useful. However, one of the links on the map is to 'Browse all news by date' - really just so the search engines can find my static pages, and yes this page has a 1000+ links to each of the news pages. It also has a pr of 2.

I put all these links on one page to avoid splitting them and passing information to page2, 3 etc with a? in the url, which to a certain extent would defeat the point as i want as many bots to find my content as poss.

Thanks very much for the insight Jim - im going to have to find away to break that page up. :)