Massive Drop in PR - Why suddenly penalized?

[liquiddog]

I couldn't help but notice a substantial drop in my Google page rank. It used to be the page rank meter would go almost half way, now it is zero. Recent changes:

* I recently moved to a new web host. I do notice the pages load slower, but it's just the images.
* On a page that was getting a lot of traffic, I updated a poor quality image with a new image that is much better quality. I did not change the file name.

Other than that, the site has remained unchanged for 3 years. When I search my domain name one of my pages is the 5th result down. The first result is a website from China that has completely duplicated my website. When I click the website it doesn't work, but clicking "cached" does show a duplicate of my website. I believe this is also a possible cause, because it has been newly added.

Is it the duplicate website, or one of the other possibilities? I have to admit, this breaks my spirit a little. I feel like I spent a lot of my time building that site and now it is a complete loss.

[SEOPTI]

PR5 -> PR7 for a free widget.

[spadilla]

I have a blog that dropped from PR3 to PR2 this week. Probably my own fault - I haven't been blogging as much lately and I added an affiliate link (with nofollow though) to the sidebar. Although I noticed that my incoming natural links increased, I seem to have still gotten slapped for whatever reason. -- I heart u Google :/

[Boulder90]

Yeah Tedster I was referring to page rank.

[tedster]

Then the answer is no, just changing images cannot affect PageRank for the url.

[davidof]

One of the sites I administer just went from an 8 to a 9.

[JS_Harris]

What's pagerank?

/jk

I feel so liberated not having a clue what my sites pagerank is anymore, removing that little green bar from my browser was the most productive move I ever made. The ONLY figures I watch nowadays are traffic figures. Let all of those artificial "value measurement attempt" gizmos give other people gray hair, I'M FREE!

[Lame_Wolf]

Same thing happend to and it continues for 2 weeks now. Lost my PR from 5 to 3 on the main page and i lost the pr for my inner pages ( had lots of PR3+ inner pages ).

Ditto

The only thing we have in common is that I also changed hosts 3 or 4 days before this happend..but i doubt that this is the reason..

I moved from a shared server to a dedicated server, but that was almost a year ago, so I very much doubt that is the reason why.

[Lame_Wolf]

Sounds like the old "Selling Paid Links PR Smackdown" to me.

I do not sell or buy links, but I went from 5 to 3.

Fark is only a 4 now, was a lot higher IIRC.

[drall]

I have watched one of our biggest sites flux from its 5 year pr 7 down to a 5 then up to a 6 then down to a 5 and then back up to a pr 7.

No, I repeat NO changes in traffic with any of the pr changes.

Draw from that what you will....

[Slinger]

Our site PR1 to a PR2 on homepage. One subpage went from a 1 to 2. It shifted allot of 1's to other pages and grayed out the ones it left behind. I use "rel=nofollow" all over the site and after 3 months to my amazement, it is working perfectly, sending page rank to specific pages.

[Boulder90]

I went from a 4 in May of 2008(launched in July 2007) to now a 1 as of yesterday.

Very strange.

[Marcia]

oddsod, this other thread is the one that's on the homepage about a PR update:

[webmasterworld.com...]