PR drops to Zero for some long established sites

[schleefdaddy]

Has anyone noticed a sudden drop to a PR0? A few people over on the Google groups board have gone from PR5-6's to nothing overnight. These sites are very established, non-spammy and have been online since 2000.

The SERPS however, have not been affected. Curious if anyone else is seeing this.

[Salazar]

Our established company and web presence, also went to pr zero. I wonder if there is a toolbar glitch on a single Google data center... our company is in S. California... anyone else?

[piconsulting]

I also noticed one of my sites go from PR5 - PR0. The site: results still looks about the same, as well as rankings and traffic. I hope this is just a PR update.

[reseller]

deezin, adma and Salazar

Have you been involved in Sell/Buy of backlinks?

[adma]

All internal pages which had various PRs have also been affected. Is it normal? & if so how long does it take?

Thanx

[Adam_Lasnik]

Hey there,

I'm happy to ask some of my colleagues to check into the issues that have been raised here.

In the meantime, though, I'd like to assure you that any negative shifts you see in TB PR are not likely to signal either very-recent or impending problems with your site. We update the TB PR semi-regularly, but not on a basis in which you'd want to use it for real-time forecasting and analysis ;)

In other words, this isn't the way we communicate that your site is violating our guidelines (unlike our Webmaster Tools, where Webmasters of penalized sites can often find a warning/status message).

[adma]

@ reseller

Well, we do not sell links, however we have a paid text link placed on a well ranked site.

[reseller]

adma

however we have a paid text link placed on a well ranked site

Thanks for reply.

Awaiting to hearing from deezin and Salazar too ;-)

[deezin]

hi there - thanks for checking into it Adam. Nope, I don't pay for links anywhere.

[Webmeister]

I wouldn't worry about the paid links issue. Even if you have paid links, the worst that would happen according to Matt Cutts is that the paid link would be devalued. You would not lose all of your PageRank over it.

I would chalk this all up to a glitch, probably related to an upcoming PageRank update.

[decaff]

Thanks for updating Adam..

The little green bar can really be a distraction for some and unfortunately drive bad decisions on how to make that little bugger go north...

Frankly, I haven't used it as any type of measuring stick/business decision tool for the last 3 years...and I have never had any problems with Google because my decisions are all about site usability, human user satisfaction...and conversions...

[m1t0s1s]

...on three datacenters I see a nice pagerank for my new site. :-)

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:42 pm (utc) on April 27, 2007]
[edit reason] mention of specific tools not allowed [/edit]

[moftary]

Yes the following DC's show new PR:

64.233.189.*
66.249.89.*
72.14.235.*

[hvacdirect]

m1t0s1s,I think posting links to SEO tools is a big no-no here.

[edited by: hvacdirect at 9:37 pm (utc) on April 27, 2007]

[deezin]

Yes, these ones -

64.233.189.*
66.249.89.*
72.14.235.*

are the data centers that I still see a '6' ... the other ones are all '0'. Are the ones that are still '6' going to change to '0' too?

[adma]

Yes, a couple of DCs show a new value. Lets hope for the best.

[steveb]

Nothing from April included.

[jean_lope]

Yes as expected, there is new pr now. The moment some sites went pr zero from high pr, there was feeling that impending update is round the corner.

[Big_Guy]

yep, my site is back on a few Datacenters now, same PR as before :(

As I check again a few more centers are back as well

[amadeus]

The previous PR is back. Adam, thanks for your insight!

[Adam_Lasnik]

You're welcome! :)

[reseller]

Adam_Lasnik

How about updating us in future about possible PR update the moment it starts. That will spare tedster few threads of the kind:

OMG..my PR went down to zero...blame it on Adam_Lasnik :-)

[edited by: reseller at 6:06 am (utc) on April 28, 2007]

[rcain]

..maybe the sites remained relatively static, but the rest of google-verse got bigger & changed shape - the iterative algorithms used to calculate PR would take time to 'settle' down' around the new eigenvectors over all indexes/dns. (? - just a thought...what else might cause it?)

[tedster]

An interesting theory rcain - but it can only be true IF a PR update means that new PR is being calculated.,

However, real PR is updated continually behind the scenes these days -- that is, the actual PR value that Google uses for ranking their search results. A PR update only means that a "snapshot" of PR is taken and exported to the toolbar servers. Last January, Matt Cutts called it "pretty much a non-event" at Google.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I believe the PR goes to 0 if there is an update for that particular page. Otherwise stays the same.
For my site it went from PR5 to 0 in most datacenters day before, then to PR0 on all datacenters yesterday and today half of them showing PR6(Good if it stays). No change in rankings or traffic though.

[rcain]

hi tedster, thanks for the reply - i think that was my point - could the 'purtibation' imply that there is a changed PR function now propagating? (i was just reading the thread about new google patents, PPC models, etc), or is it more likely just a local thing with toolbar servers, etc?

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I also noticed the for the sites in which there were PR changes, there in-links in the Google Webmaster Tool were not visible(showing zero).

Has anyone else noticed it?

[nailah phoomee]

one of my sites dropped from 6 to zero this time last year and never hit back. last night my other site dropped from 5 to zero and a few more sites have been slightly dropped one level. 40% of DC(s) already updated new pr.

[ccton]

What skweb said.

Me too. Same problem. Traffic actually went up.

[ccton]

I'll pretty much on the thought of 'the current displayed PR is an intermediate snapshot only', it is still under caculating, the final PR may takes several days to get there.

[tomthumb2000]

we went from 5 to 0 also a few days ago.

Traffic holding, some new backlinks came in organically recently, that's it.