Hosting change causes PR drop?

[WilliamT]

Can changing hosts by itself cause a pr drop from 3 or 4 to 1? That is the only thing that has recently changed about my site.

[jtara]

Can changing hosts by itself

There really is no such thing as "changing hosts by itself".

I can't think of many hosts that have exactly identical configurations, speed, etc.

What else changed, besides where you send the checks?

[WilliamT]

Since I posted I noticed that different tools show vastly different PR. The online tool I used yesterday had my site at 1. Last week the same tool had it at 3. Once before the same tool had it at 4. I used a different tool this morning and my PR shows as 3. A friend checked this morning using another tool and it was also 3.

That same friend says he has checked his site using various different tools and found PRs of from 1 to 5 on the same day, just from different checking sites and tools. So I guess it is not easy to really know what Google thinks your PR is!

To answer your question, though.... My site is mainly a blog, with several additional static pages. Most of the traffic goes to one or two static pages or the blog. I use stand alone WordPress as the CMS. The only thing I can think of that changed besides the payment recipient that might confuse the different PR checkers is this: My install of WP is now in the root directory where as before it was in its own directory under root. Traffic used to be redirected from root to the WP install one level below. Now it does not do that.

[edited by: phranque at 12:05 am (utc) on Mar. 25, 2008]
[edit reason] No urls, please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[ecmedia]

William it is clear that you have moved around your pages a lot. I cannot think that hosting will cause PR to change (in that case we will all be hosting our websites with companies that can give us big PRs). And to the best of my knowledge the PR checking tools are simply unreliable. A good way to check is to install G toolbar.

[WilliamT]

Thanks.

[Robert Charlton]

My install of WP is now in the root directory where as before it was in its own directory under root. Traffic used to be redirected from root to the WP install one level below. Now it does not do that.

The urls of your pages have changed because of this re-arrangement, and you're probably losing some inbound linking credit. If you have applied the proper 301 redirects, eventually most of that should come back. Toolbar PageRank, though, is only updated about four times a year, so it's going to be a while before it reflects the effects of your redirects, assuming that you've done the redirection properly.

You should be using a server header checker to make sure you've done your redirects properly. Also, look at old backlinks, if you know where they were, to make sure you've caught the important ones. A PageRank tool isn't what you should be looking at.

[WilliamT]

OK - Thanks but I might be misunderstanding. I believe my urls are still the same so I did not put any 301's in place. A link to my home page before would have looked link this: http://example.com/ . It is the same now. So the urls have not really changed, correct? On my old host I was telling incoming links where to go, (one level down in the WordPress folder). Now I don't need to do that because incomings find the WP install in the root folder.

I did check by going to some of the links that were in place before I moved hosts, and they still work. So that seems to confirm there is no need to do anything there.

Let me know if I am missing something in my reasoning. Thanks!

Moderator note: Changed http: // mysite dot com/ to http://example.com, just in case we get into further url discussion. Note that example.com can never be owned, and we prefer to use it for examples on WebmasterWorld.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:26 pm (utc) on Mar. 25, 2008]

[jtara]

A link to my home page before would have looked link this: http://example.com/ . It is the same now.

But that's (the link URL) not what matters - it's the landing page. And your landing page has changed.

Your landing page previously was in the subdirectory - now it's the home page itself.

I don't see a fix for this, other than to just wait it out - or go back to your old structure.