Google rank inconsistencies for our site.

[rkocatas]

We are trying to sort our a bunch of inconsistencies regarding our site. We recently re-launched due to a change from CFM to .NET. We also took the opportunity to merge to web properties into 1. In the course of this we did the following (after intensive research)

1. Made sure all domains redirected with a 301 to http://www.example.com
2. Made sure that all previous example.com/blah.cfm 301'd to the proper example.com/blah.aspx
3. In 90% of pages replace blah.aspx with /information/blue-widget (301 again)
4. Checked our robots.txt, meta-tags.
5-100. Little things that research indicated was a good idea.

Now our PR has gone from 5 to 0 on every page.
Webmaster Tools indicated our home page was last visited on July 31,2007
Link:www.example.com shows no back links

What is inconsistent is
1) Webmaster tools shows 28507 external links to our site
2) G's cache shows "cache of http://www.example.com/ as retrieved on Sep 24, 2007 21:38:34 GMT."
3) Our traffic is only marginally down.

[tedster]

Google's public reporting functions - the link: operator, toolbar PR reports (TBPR), and so on - are often significantly out of synch with the actual real data that Google uses to calculate rankings. If your traffic is basically hanging in there, then chalk it up to reporting bugs. Google does NOT use the publicly visible data as the source of the algorithm's calculations.

Webmaster Tools reports can be more accurate, and in the case of links especially, more thorough. However, even here, the reporting bugs do creep in.

[rkocatas]

But the webmaster tools are still saying that they have not been to our home page in almost 2 months which is at odds with the date on the cached page.

I would add that the "last visited" date changed daily until it stopped on 7/31.

[tedster]

What do your server logs say about googlebot visits?

[rkocatas]

Server log shows gbot coming by all the time. Our data is consistent with their webmaster tools that show an average of 5800+ pages crawled per day.

Despite this the "Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Jul 31, 2007." text remains fixed.

[rkocatas]

Interesting find.

According to Google, our most popular page prior to the relaunch has changed.

Your page with the highest PageRank
Aug http://www.example.com/default.aspx
Jul [secure.example.com...]
Jun [secure.example.com...]

Now we have a 301 redirecting all traffic from the previously most popular domain to our primary domain.

- from [secure.example.com...]
- http://www.example.com/

Is it possible that the last visit date is still referencing what it thinks incorrectly was our home page and is reporting a 301 which it does not like? Dates are consistent.

[tedster]

Sounds very possible - who knows how GWT works, eh? As long as you've got the traffic, you can relax. It can take a couple months for everything around a 301 to get completely sorted.