Site drops from PR6 to PR4 overnight

[zap995]

We launched a redesign of our website approximately two weeks ago, and it recently (within that timeframe) dropped from a PR6 to a PR4.

This is a very popular website in a very specific vertical receiving monthly uniques in the seven digit range.

Rankings have decline in some cases accordingly, though they haven't dropped off the face of the earth, thankfully.

This site has been active for about 3 years. I'd say it had a PR4 very shortly after launch, and eventually built up to PR6, where it has been for a couple years. What could possibly cause something like this?

Could the redesign be the culprit? We had a week of technical problems with it, which made the site inaccessible at times.

Thanks!

[edited by: tedster at 3:25 am (utc) on Sep. 17, 2008]

[bobloblawsblog]

did you change file names/ structure? if so, did you 301 redirect the old pages? did you delete pages? if it was unaccessible, goog may have indexed it during down time.

[tedster]

It's not common to see the toolbar PR change in between the four or so regular "PR updates" that happen during a year, so this is a bit of a mystery. The technical troubles you had might cause a ranking drop for a while, but not a visible PR drop.

Did your redesign change any of the URLs? Are you selling any linked ads that pass PageRank to the advertiser's site? Does your redesing use any kind of element that might LOOK like you are doing that - such as using the text "sponsored links"m or linking to internal pages of your own through a standard sized banner graphic?

[waynne]

Last night a rock steady authority good quality and totally clean site of mine dropped from a PR4 to PR2. SERs have actually increased in the order of 20% for this site in the same period.

Anyone else experienced a 2PR drop recently?

[zap995]

Hi guys. Thank you for the responses. We do not sell links. We did not change any url structures, and we are always careful to use 301s when we change the url of any ranked page. We are using some ajax/js stuff that we've never used before, but not for any controversial or sneaky purposes.

In terms of text ads, we have adsense (which we recently switched from standard units to js-enabled custom ones). And we have some text links from industrybrains.

We do have ONE hand-made text ad, but it has been around for a long time. It does not use the nofollow tag, but it probably should.

I don't know exactly when the pagerank changed, but it was recent. When was the last major toolbar update?

nick

[cooldogs]

Looks like my site just dropped from a 4 to a 3, might be an update just occurred.

[vordmeister]

I've just noticed a one point drop across a few of my sites. Possibly some sort of update in progress - recallibrating or something. I don't pay much attention these days so it could have happened earlier. Traffic still much the same. And nothing silly going on on those sites like link selling or exchanging.