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.

[adma]

Most of the DCs still shows 0!

[reseller]

Folks

Maybe some of you with hopefully temporary PR0 find some comfort in what Matt Cutts wrote [mattcutts.com] last January

Update: A few people were seeing PageRank 0 for their site. There was a small auxiliary push that needed to happen to complement the PageRank push, and that push happened a few hours ago (i.e. Jan 11, 2007). If you were getting stressed, you might want to re-check now. If you never even noticed, well, good for you. :)

Who knows. Maybe there has been a small auxiliary push this time too.

Good luck.

[edited by: reseller at 3:05 pm (utc) on April 30, 2007]

[aok88]

Yeah, one of my main sites has been experiencing the same thing. On Friday (4/27) morning it was a PR6 and then in the afternoon it went to a PR0 and is still that way today.

I have to believe that since neither our rankings nor our traffic has suffered at all, it's nothing to worry about.
Correct me if I am wrong, but if you were to all of a sudden get the dreaded Google PR0 Penalty, then your rankings would disappear immediately too, right?

Or should we worry that since the PR dropped to zero, we've all gotten the PR0 penalty for one reason or another (like Google turned up a filter that we all got caught in somehow) and it's just a matter of time before our rankings drop out of sight too?

I sure hope it's just a toolbar glitch. Has anyone seen this last this long before and then witness it go back to normal?

(thanks reseller, I wrote this before I saw your post above - hope this is the same thing)

[skweb]

Currently (it was fine till Friday when we last checked) PR zero for a well established website with no change in traffic or rankings. I am assuming that it is simply a glitch.

[mattg3]

No PR change here as yet. It's there where it has been for years.

[walkman]

>> 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.

NOT true. Maybe google engineers need to see the page manually to lose it, but I know sites do lose all the visible--and probably the invisible to us--PR. Seen it happen after buying a HIGH PR link from a very reputable site (it was a banner).

[jaimes]

Definately notice a problem.

PR5 to Zero , All internal pages have PR0 as well. On Datacenter 209 all rankings are gone. All internal backlinks are gone.

We had 1590 out of 1600 pages go supplemental last month and since made sure all titles and meta descriptions were different on a dynamic site and last week 250 pages got re-indexed. Not sure if any of this is related.

Loss of traffic, not sure what else to do?

[Adam_Lasnik]

Hey again,

If you've seen your PR adjusted to a non-zero number OR you've lost significant traffic, this thread does not really apply to you.

If, however, your PR has dropped to zero AND you've not seen any significant loss in traffic from Google, rest assured that this is most likely a PR-reporting (PR on Toolbar) error; while admittedly alarming at first site, it's nothing to worry about. The tail does not wag the dog in these circumstances :)

With that said, I'll be chatting with some colleagues again today to hash out what might be occurring, and I'll report back here with any news.

Have a good week everyone.

[schleefdaddy]

If this helps anyone understand a penalty from a Page rank drop, I recently witnessed a competitor of mine lose ALL placement they had in the SERPS, yet backlinks and PR were all intact. The fact that so many webmasters with established sites have experienced this PR disappearance without any affect on SERPS, should clear some smoke from air.

[Interent Yogi]

I am back to where I was.

[aok88]

Thankfully, our PR is finally back too, albeit 1 less than before, but at least it's not 0!

Interestingly, all our competitors dropped 1 also, almost across the board.

[kidder]

Our PR story - Index page has not changed from PR4 but quite a few of our internal pages have gone to PR5. I expected the index page to jump but I think it was like this last time around - internal pages went up first. Anyone else seeing this?

[mirrornl]

i have 4 sites with a TBPR of zero now,
today on all datacenters
no loss of traffic yet(previous tbpr was 4,4,3, and 2)

scary

[Marcia]

I've had 3 go PR0 and what those have in common is a HUGE number of scrapers linking. No dodgy linking involved on my part, just a bunch of unsolicited, unwanted one-way IBLs from scraper sites.

I realize that the scrapers are an Adsense issue (nuff said), but they're wreaking havoc on Search.

Those who have had sites go PR0, how do you do when doing a search for your site with just example.com? I'm seeing that as a symptom.

[mirrornl]

just example.com,
for 2 sites ok,other 2 sites very bad

[reseller]

Folks!

Though it is most likely a Toolbar PR-reporting error that causing your PR to show ZERO PR, however that leaves us with a significant problem!

At present when we visit a site of TBPR0, we really don't know for sure whether we are looking at a true value of PR0 or we are just seeing a site suffering of Toolbar PR error.

I.e we can't trust the Toolbar PR value at present. Very sad indeed (:(

I really hope our good friends at the plex would be able very soon to fix the TBPR.

[edited by: reseller at 3:21 pm (utc) on May 1, 2007]

[jaimes]

update:
PR came back, but loss of 1 from PR5 to PR4. Internals all down 1 as well.
On datacenter 209 all ranks still lost on others were ok, down a little on some major words exaclty the same on others.
j

[coultog]

I don't know if anyone's interested, but google has been downgrading itself too!

[google.co.uk...] <--- TBPR of 8

[lfgoal]

I didn't think I'd have to chime in but I just checked one of my sites and the top two pages have moved from PR6 to PR5. No loss of traffic whatsoever.

[simey]

I don't know if anyone's interested, but google has been downgrading itself too!
[google.co.uk...] <--- TBPR of 8

hehe, maybe some people adding 'no follow' tags to links to their business partner google?

(I know- the toolbar PR is months out-of-date....)

[decaff]

I.e we can't trust the Toolbar PR value at present. Very sad indeed (:(

New Google tactic to take away the link buying/selling incentive...

[1script]

New Google tactic to take away the link buying/selling incentive...

Why only select sites though? Suspected link sellers? PR0 is sure to repel some potential buyers...

[tedster]

I'm sure it's a bug and not a conspiracy.

[reseller]

tedster

I'm sure it's a bug

That must have been a nasty summer bug :-)

[AustrianOak]

From a 5 to 0 here as well.

[freelistfool]

I'm seeing updates on many internal pages that didn't have any pagerank. Now they have it. In addition, I'm seeing some pages that were pagerank zero with the "grey" bar. I'm assuming...hoping...they'll go back to normal after the update is complete.

[decaff]

I'm sure it's a bug and not a conspiracy.

No conspiracy theories here..simple logic....
How do you disrupt the PR perception as seen from users looking to sell/buy links...?

Cause a disruption in the toolbar...and call it a bug...!

On the other hand... ;-)

[freelistfool]

One other thing I noticed is that some of my sites show "Data is not available at this time" in webmaster tools for "Your page with the highest PageRank".

[1script]

No conspiracy theories here..simple logic....
How do you disrupt the PR perception as seen from users looking to sell/buy links...?

Another question to ask would be why would you want to disrupt a little cottage industry built around and totally dependent on YOUR brand. No one would do that in their right mind but then, again, who has as much money as Google has? Maybe they don't need any more security in the marketplace?

[reseller]

Folks

Please no more conspiracy theories.

Adam Lasnik has been very kind and honest in his feedback on this thread in telling us what might be the cause of the current errors in the TBPR values.

It could be a bug or another of those popular Adam's Bad Data Pushes :-)

The issue now is to let other webmasters know that the TBPR values aren't reliable at all at present until Google tells us otherwise.