PR dropped from 6 to 4 on very old site, traffic plummetted

[Artful]

The site is 10 years old. Been consistently a PR 6 for years. Never did anything spammy or SEO-ish. We recently made a few changes. We
1. moved some external links on the home page to a resources page
2. added titles to a bunch of newsletters that just had the TITLE "newsletter" to be more meaningful
3. we also changed the preferred domain to be example.com instead of www.example.com in Google Webmaster Tools

Now www.example.com is not listed but example.com is. www.example.com used to have 29000 external links and now it doesnt even show up in GWT external links. I know PR was just updated. If this is just due to (3), and we change it back, I wonder how long it will take to change again?

Ummm ....... help?

[edited by: tedster at 1:29 am (utc) on May 2, 2008]
[edit reason] use example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

You'll need to give Google three weeks (or more) to "catch up" on the fact that you just changed *all* of your URLs from www.example.com/<whatever> to example.com/<whatever>

Changing it back will simply re-start the clock, and add three more weeks (or more) from the date of change-back.

If you can get in touch with some of your important linking partners and ask them to update your link to "example.com", that will help.

I just 'moved' a small and relatively new local mobile site to a much shorter and easier-to-type-in domain. It was a PR3, and it's taken six weeks to regain its former glory -- well, most of it, so far. Generally, the higher the initial PR, the faster this goes, because higher-PR sites get more attention from Googlebot.

The major SEs don't like change. I think they took Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the hyperlink, at his word [w3.org].

Jim

[Artful]

Thanks a lot for your advice Jim. That explains a lot. Would putting 301s in place help at all?